From Teaching Open Source
[edit] Nobody's Home Ground
When an open source developer in Pakistan works with a software tester in the UK and a documentation writer in Mexico, the culture of their collaboration is not that of Pakistan, the UK, or Mexico -- it's a synthetic third culture, the culture of Open Source and of cyberspace. As with travel to another physical land and immersion in another language and culture, this journey can be exhillarating and exhausting.
(Ruth Hill Useem first described the "Third Culture" phenomenon in the mid-1960s, where the children of expatriate residents -- such as army brats and missionary kids -- find themselves at home neither in their culture of their birth land nor in the land in which they grew up. Instead, they create a Third Culture in which they are most at home. They relate more closely to other people who grew up with a similar Third Culture experience than to those of their first or second culture).
[edit] The Lingua Franca of Open Source
In How to Become a Hacker, Eric Raymond notes that English is the lingua franca of open source. This appears to be the case in all but a very few open source projects, probably because English is spoken in more countries (132) than any other language and has a rich technical vocabulary.
[edit] Resources
- Third Culture Kid (Wikipedia)
- Ruth Hill Useem (Wikipedia)
- TCK World (TCK means "Third Culture Kids")
- How to Become a Hacker