What’s a good way to promote open source spirit without writing code? Here’s an idea: “open source cooking.” That’s what we’ve been doing in Munich for the past 8 years.
Open source cooking has become our regular open source promotion activity because we’ve found that open source and cooking have many things in common.
Collaborative Cooking
The Munich Open Source Meeting has been organizing several events since its founding in July 2009 at Café Netzwerk. These events are typically held on Friday evenings. The meeting provides a way for open source project workers or enthusiasts to get to know each other. Our motto is: “Every fourth Friday for free software.” Of course, on some weekends, we also hold workshops. After that, we quickly added many other activities, including white sausage breakfasts, sauna sessions, and cooking events.
In fact, the first open source cooking gathering was a bit chaotic, but after 8 years and 15 events, we can now provide a hearty meal for 25-30 participants.
Looking back at these nights, we increasingly find that there are many similarities between cooking together and collaborating in open source communities.
The Free and Open Source Spirit in Cooking Steps
Here are a few ways cooking and open source spirit are similar: we are happy to cooperate and work towards a common goal
- We form a community
- Because we share the same interests and hobbies, we can learn more about ourselves and others, and we can collaborate together
- We also make mistakes, but we learn from our mistakes and share our experiences about them for the common good, so that each other can avoid making the same mistakes
- Everyone contributes what they are good at, because everyone has their own expertise
- We mobilize others to contribute and join us
- Although collaboration is key, there’s inevitably a bit of chaos
- Everyone benefits
The Open Source Atmosphere in Cooking
Like many successful open source gatherings, open source cooking also requires some collaboration and organizational structure. Before each event, we organize all members to vote on the menu, instead of just giving everyone a slice of pizza. We want to truly make a delicious meal. So far, we’ve made Japanese, Mexican, Hungarian, Indian and other regional cuisines. We won’t list them all due to space limitations.
As in life, cooking together also requires mutual respect and understanding among all members, so we also try to provide targeted food for vegetarians, food allergy sufferers, or people with certain preferences. It’s very helpful (and fun!) to do some small-scale tests at home before officially starting to cook.
Scalability is also important. It can easily take 3 hours to purchase necessary ingredients at the grocery store. So we use some spreadsheet tools (naturally LibreOffice Calc) to list the required ingredients and corresponding costs.
We work with volunteers, and for each dinner we have a “package maintainer” to timely create menus and find unique solutions when problems arise.
Although not everyone is a chef, with some help and a reasonable distribution of tasks and responsibilities, it’s easy to get everyone involved. In a way, handling 18kg of tomatoes and 100 eggs won’t feel like a difficult task, believe me! The only limitation is that an oven only has four burners, so it might be time to invest more in infrastructure.
Publishing has time requirements, although not very strict. We usually serve the main course within a quite “flexible” time between 21:30 and 01:30, even so, this time is a hard release rule.
Finally, like many open source projects, cooking documentation also has room for improvement. Tail-end work like washing dishes also has room for optimization.
Some New Feature Points for the Future
Some ideas we’re considering include:
- Carrying out activities in other countries
- Buying and cooking a 700-euro giant pumpkin, and
- Finding a store that can provide discounts for our purchases
The last point, and the motivation for open source software: always remember that there are people living in the shadows who are distressed by not having equal access to resources. How can we help them through the spirit of open source?
With this in mind, I look forward to the next open source cooking gathering. If reading the above makes you feel it’s not perfect and you want to run such an activity yourself, we are very happy for you to borrow our ideas, or even copy one. We are also happy for you to participate in our activities, even give some speeches and Q&A sessions.
Author: Florian Effenberger Translation: Linux China Original: What do open source and cooking have in common?
