[TUHS] Re: Flame award

["Joseph Holsten" <joseph@josephholsten.com>]

Warren Toomey via TUHS wrote:
> It still feels weird that Usenix chose me for the Flame award, given such
> greats as Doug, Margo, Radia and others have previously received the
> same award. In reality, the award belongs to every TUHS member who has
> contributed documents, source code, tape images, anecdotes, knowledge
> and wisdom, and who have given their time and energy to help others
> with problems. I've been a steward of a remarkable community over three
> decades and I feel honoured and humbled to receive recognition for it.

As someone who’s stewarded (and cat-herded) smaller communities for less time, I can say that three decades of persistent community gardening is incredible. Sure, people show up, drop off their work, then disappear. Sometimes they hang around to chat, or show up when they need help, maybe even occasionally get HYPERFIXATED and invest tremendous effort into a thing as part of the group. And maybe they fall away only to return a decade later.

But those people do it because they know the stability the organizer brings. How many random abandoned source drops are up in sourceforge or github? I’m sure there’s a super specific distributed crypto internet relay chat mobile watch app channel that’s focused on getting SVR4 derivatives bootstrapped onto ARM 64-bit platforms, but this mailing list existed before it and may well exist after. More importantly, so will its archives.

Kudos!

--
Joseph Holsten