What are Open-Source Happiness Packets?
People are generally much more loved than we think we are. But while it's easy for many to complain when they don't like something, we're often fairly silent when things are good. Open-source communities are no different, especially when our main communication channels are textual and virtual.
However, the feeling that you made a difference, that your work matters and has value, and that the people you work with are happy to work with you, is an awesome and important feeling. With Open-Source Happiness Packets, we're trying to spread that feeling.
How does it work?
Openly expressing appreciation, gratitude, or happiness to other people can be difficult. This is especially true when you don't know them very well. Many of us come from cultures in which people are not open by default about such feelings, and naturally feel uncomfortable or even creepy to share them.
Open-Source Happiness Packets is a very simple platform to anonymously reach out to the people that you appreciate or to whom you are thankful in your open-source community. Your message can be sent anonymously if you feel uncomfortable to share your name with the recipient. Of course, we encourage you to share your name, but it's completely optional!
Happiness Archive
If both the sender and the recipient agree, we can publish the Happiness Packet on the website. With this, we're building an archive of open-source happiness that people and communities can use to draw inspiration.
As an example, here are two random messages from our archive:
Anonymous message
Hi!
I've always tried to be positive towards people whose work I admire as a way to give something back to them — usually I just send the authors an email. I do think that we need a cultural change towards expressing your good feelings to other people rather than just criticism and I very much agree with the message of the project although I have no problem contacting random strangers, but I can see that many other people probably would.
So thank you very much for doing this, I hope the happiness packets project will make a lot of people a bit happier in the long run.
From Kiara Navarro to Jared Smith
Jared Smith was the first person that I meet in the Fedora Project. I had the chance to talk with him while I was just arriving at FUDCon 2010. Over that time I was studying electronics and he told me that he studied electronics as well, it was great. Today I want to thank to you Jared, because you have been an inspiration for most of us in the Fedora Community. Thanks for always taking care of the nitty-gritty details when you attend in some event of the community, that's really neat. I always see your responses on the developer mailing list when someone comes to ask about Asterisk and topics related and I feel happy to have the privilege to meet such a clever, friendly and humble contributor. Keep going with the spark that contagious others.