What are Open-Source Happiness Packets?
People are generally much more loved than they think they are. Especially when things don't go according to plan, other people almost never think as harshly of you as you might think of yourself. It's easy for us to complain when bad things happen, and yet 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.
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 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. We hope to build an archive of open-source happiness that communities can draw inspiration from.
As an example, here are two random messages from our archive:
From Baptiste Mispelon to Katie ✨🐨✨
Thanks for all the work you do, and in particular for helping me spread the special love of emoji in all its wonder and weirdness.
I've had an idea for an emoji talk float in my head for a while but I could never manage to turn it into something concrete.
The one you made and presented all over the world exceeded anything I could ever come up with.
Thanks for putting it out into the world!
The world of OSS can be lonely and sometimes even 💩, but it's people like you who make it 💯.
May your life be full of 🥄 and your internet pipes full of ✨.
Take care,
Baptiste
From Kenneth Love to PyCascades team
I just wanted to say that you all produced an amazing conference. Thank you so much for all the work you did to make it friendly, open, welcoming, and inclusive. It was great seeing a brand new Python conference have such a wide range of talks on everything from type hints to Unicode to diversity awareness to Rust.
This was, honestly, one of the nicest and best run conferences I've been to in a long time. You all deserve way more praise and accolades than I can possibly give. The entire Python and conference communities are better off for having all of you in them.
Thank you.