“Free and open source from the roots up. “Open source” can be much more than a development methodology. For me, it also constitutes a world view that upends institutionalized notions of competitive advantage that saw their apex in the twentieth century.”

Excerpt from Paul Kim‘s “Why I Joined Automattic” published September 9, 2009.

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, CC by, Flickr Hosted

I’ve come to think of the people who build open source and free culture into their businesses as not only having the creativity and resolve to put their values at the core of their businesses, but also the foresight and humility to know that the future is always built on the past, that the future is outside of their control, but possibly not their contribution.

This is one of the main reasons I so enjoy working with Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider, the rest of the Automattic crew, and the WordPress.com VIPs and WordPress businesses I get to so regularly interact with. I’m ecstatic that Paul has joined us!

The term “fundraising” in Toni’s article title “Automattic fundraising” reminded me that it was time to donate the money you gave by clicking on the ads here in 2007.

In 2007 that was $475 USD from Google Adsense and nothing from anything else.

$100 was already donated to my uni friend Microserf Nicole Steinbok‘s Great Lake Walk to raise money for Canadian Cancer Society. My $100 donation actually became $400 for the Canadian Cancer Society as I let Nicole donate it in her name so that Microsoft would match her, and her Microserf husband Jeff Steinbok generously matched donations, which Microsoft also matched. I like to stretch my donation dollar. Nicole raised $6301 and walked 49 km!

Just now I donated the rest of the money, $400 to Sami Barker and Esquimalt High friends’ Helping build a playground for youth in San Pancho through GiveMeaning.

San Pancho is a small developing fishing village just north of PV. My Aunt, a resident of the village, has two young boys. She has a close connection with the school, and says the town would benefit from a playground at the elementary school. A group of twelve students from Esquimalt High are participating in a fundraising event to buy supplies. Under the direction of Mr. Ken Henderson, the students will visit the town in March where they will live with the locals, study spanish and hopefully get to help out with the playground’s construction

Thank you for your support

By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.

This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.

I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.

I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.

The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.

I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.

But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!

But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.