four bean soup |
A "sneak peek" into the kitchen at four bean soup. |
four bean soup is a family business and I wanted to share something our family did to help our local community be a nicer place. People before us did things greater and lesser, big and small, that have impacted the world around us. While reflecting on what we did, I starting thinking about how to apply it to our internet communities as well.
Let’s start with what we did:
Crossroads1, our church, started a yearly effort called Go Cincinnati2 5 years ago. We’ve wanted to be more active and involved so we decided giving 4 hours of our time to help the city seemed like a good way to do it. We were assigned to help the Cincinnati Parks department beautify the Mount Storm park in Clifton.
Our group of 40-50 volunteers spent four hours laying down fresh mulch, putting fresh paint of picnic tables and benches, planting flowers, and clearing away a ton of grapevine and honeysuckle “brush”. These are tasks that would have taken the parks department weeks to complete. While it might seem small or insignificant, we were able to help the parks department accomplish normal tasks and hopefully help them focus on really important things.
The open source community is just as important as local communities. Where would we be without Vint Cerf’s efforts? What would life be like without Michael Widenius program, MySQL? I know my daily life would be much different with David Heinemeier Hansson’s release of Ruby on Rails.
Local tech communities also play an important role, as they are a good place to share and learn on tech topics.
There are so many ways to get involved in making communities a better place. So of them include:
Saying “Thank you” can also play an important role in making communities a better place. If someone is doing non-profit or open source works, sometimes a heartfelt “Thank you for open sourcing Ruby on Rails, it has really impacted my daily life by allowing me to make a great living by writing beautiful readable code to build websites” can go a long way. A small gesture can sometimes really brighten up someone’s day.
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