Human interaction in globalized world

Human interaction in globalized world

Let me tell you what it's all about,
it's called money dependence today,
and people just keep on going on
looking at the dollar bill,
and nothing else around them.
no love, no friendship, nothing else,
just the dollar bill coming on into their pocket,
into their bank account,
and that's too much of heaven
bringing them underground.

-- Eiffel 65, Too Much of Heaven

Forget the faceless international corporations you are facing when buying ordinary stuff. There is no extra layer between you and me, the developer of Ronja. You can talk to me on the mailing list. I design it, you use it. You tell me about problems, I try to fix them. I am not trying to conceal problems or hide the truth - the sources are published, problems are ventilated on the mailing list.

Work with friends, make it fun

The best way how one can have fun building Ronja is to arrange building together with friends. Ronja can be mostly built without thinking about the details. We tried to do all the thinking for you and wrote simple, easy to follow instructions. You can then focus on chatting with your friends while doing the manual work. If you have fun building with your friends, you suddenly don't need to calculate the time spend building Ronja as expense, and Ronja becomes much cheaper for you.

Building Ronja with friends can be more fun than just chatting with them without actually doing anything, like in a restaurant. A special atmosphere arises, like in the historic times when people sat in the evenings over a candle and did manual things together.

"[...] building Ronja was fun." (Jan Kleisner)

"It was very amusing for the whole course of building work. First I was afraid of it, but as soon as I started, it fascinated me immediately." (Filip Nemec, in Czech)

Cooperation instead of competition

Ronja, having it's development based solely on free software tools, and publishing all guides freely under the GNU Free Documentation License, is based on cooperation. Compare to commercial products, which are based on competition.

"The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual. ... One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff..."

-- Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins

Dehumanization of workers in 3rd world

The problem of consumer goods produced in 3rd world countries is illustrated in the article The Dehumanization of Young Workers Producing Our Computer Keyboards.

Building own Ronja instead of buying a ready-made solution fixes this problem for a single product.