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