I recently sent in my membership for GWWC, and just got confirmation for the larger of my two donations for the year, and this article got me thinking:
The membership form asked me (iirc) what I expected to be donating before learning about GWWC and what I expect after joining GWWC. I filled in the “before” field based on historical behavior (~2% of income). But I think that was a wrong answer on my part—the main thing that GWWC changed for me was the idea of 10% of income as the focal point. But since I decided to join a year ago, I’ve encountered the 10% idea elsewhere, in only slightly less persuasive ways, so I probably would have committed to 10% pretty soon anyway. We may be overcounting the impact of GWWC because people whose donation patterns would have gone up over time anyway are not accounting for that (unless you already do in your analysis).
I’m an open source driver developer, and I’ve been involved in the hiring process for our driver team. From my experience in hiring: Participating in any open source project you’re interested in is the best way to recommend yourself as a candidate. We get to totally skip the resume[1] and the write-some-code-on-the-whiteboard BS, because we’ve already googled you and looked through the actual patches you’ve made and how you interacted with other developers on the projects you’ve tried to work with. The interview process then becomes “let me tell you about our group and what it’s like and some things we might be interested in you working on.”
[1] (actually, a bachelor’s degree in something is required. CS does not score bonus points)