Quoting a good deal of the story from the site. More here. This person could use your help. Hell, we could all use help -- the weather is getting real intense out there...

In January of 2003, before the war in Iraq began, Deborah Mayer, a public school teacher in Bloomington, Indiana, said to her class that she thought peace was an option to war and that we should seek out peaceful solutions to problems before going to war.

Angry parents objected to Mayer's statement and accused her of being unpatriotic and anti-Bush. They insisted that she not mention peace in her class again and that she be terminated.  Peace Month, a traditional time for teaching students about civil rights and peaceful mediation, was canceled.

Mayer, who had until then been acclaimed an exemplary teacher, and who had recently earned her administration credentials, was terminated.

Since that time, Mayer has lost not only her job, but her career, her health insurance, her home, her life savings, and her independence.  She cannot get another job.  She now resides with her son who is a doctor in Madison, Wisconsin.

In 2004, Mayer, through her attorney, Michael Schultz, filed suit against Monroe County Community School Corporation et al, for violation of her First Amendment right of free speech, (Cause No: 1:04-CV-1695 B/S). The school corporation contends that Mayer's speech was not protected because THE WAR IN IRAQ IS NOT A MATTER OF PUBLIC CONCERN. Unbelievable!

 

for Mike Golby

Tectonic, a South African open source newsrag, today runs a story titled Open source the focus at NGO conference...

The South African NGO Network's (Sangonet) second annual "ICTs for Civil Society" conference and exhibition will have a strong emphasis on open source software.

Sangonet executive director, David Barnard, says the conference will target NGOs experienced in the open source field, as well as NGOs who haven't actively engaged with open source software yet.

I hope my title slug above is warranted and that the code is getting down to the people who need it most and know best what to do with it. Diametrically opposed to the thrust of open source, imperial power has a way of replicating itself via the carrier DNA of the proprietary information technologies that have traditionally maintained and supported closed societies. Yihla Moja -- the man is dead.

And just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

The auto-generated chart on the left shows all blog posts (in this case 74,977 of em) that contain nonprofit per day for the last 30 days. This is pretty cool. You can use these widgets on any site or blog simply by plugging in the code supplied with every "chart" search. Hmmm... not making much sense? Just try it -- simple as pie. You can get your own chart here.

And here's another one demonstrating the short half-life of compassion...

I'm working with a new company that's about to announce its plans at DEMO in the next couple weeks. I've included a pile of pointers to opensource orgs the right sidebar of the Krugle blog ("links we like"). If you're interested in where open source software is at and where it's headed, do take a look. If you can recommend additional sites or blogs, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

A couple posts down from this, Emily Weinberg notes that not everybody is born with the gene that enables inherent understanding of how to subscribe to RSS, RDF, Atom and other arcane forms of web page syndication.

The solution I've discovered is FeedBurner. It's free -- unless you opt for the Pro version -- and very well worth checking out. For example, compare the subscription page for one of my blogs to this sort of monstrostity. It's actually possible to subscribe to the latter -- I tried it and it worked -- but it's sure uninviting to any but the most geekified visitors.

On a happier note, I set this up today, just to dig a little deeper into how it works. If you dig around like I did, you can roll your own nonprofit search engine in a New York minute (or ten).

Yeah, you know: that Craig! The BBC reports on Craig Newmark's Craigslist and its "well over three billion page views" per month -- making it damn near as popular as my blog.

Everything about Craig and the company he incorporated, almost reluctantly in 1999, makes no sense in business terms. But that is its genius, and the reason why its users love it, and swear by it.

His mantras, which he articulated again from the podium of the New York Foreign Press Center, are that it is a real and reciprocal online community that is "just trying to give people a break" across the 190 cities it serves.

This is going to risk sounding like an advertisement, but it's not. I have no affiliation with either of the outfits mentioned. However, I discovered this recently and signed up myself. I think this is a dynamite deal for any nonprofit that needs its own blog. Best way to get the picture is to go to this WordPress page, read enough to get the basic idea, then click through on Yahoo Hosting -- or just click here.

Not only can you get decent hosting there for $8/month, which is insanely cheap, but for the cost of an extra button-click (i.e., no cost at all) the service will set up and configure WordPress to run on your site. This is a serious boon, as setting up WordPress can be a bit tricky and time consuming if you haven't done it before.

If you need a domain name to host it at, Yahoo is ready to provide that too. For about three bucks.

I'm very impressed with WordPress. It's easy to use yet powerful, and it's open source, which means there are all kinds of community-developed themes (look and feel) and plugins (tools) you can select from. And it's all free.

On the other hand, I haven't been a major fan of Yahoo since Yang & Filo ran it (they offered to sell it to me for a cool $million in January 1995, but that's a story for another time; I tend to cry a lot when I tell it). That said, this deal is definitely worth considering if you need a professional blog in a hurry and you're on a limited budget (as which of us is not?).

Business Week runs a pretty decent story titled A Watershed for Open Source. Here's the lead-in...

In 2005, the software movement finally gained traction in Corporate America and saw a new influx of VC cash. How will 2006 shape up?

Open-source software isn't a new phenomenon. It has been winding its way through the tech world for decades, starting with Richard Stallman's Free Software movement in 1980s. But only in recent years have businesses warmed to the promise of low-cost, openly available software. In fact, open-source programs have become so popular, they now pose a legitimate threat to the established software giants.

The guy who created the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has (finally) started a blog on an MIT website. He writes...

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarrely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discourse through communal authorship.

Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space.

It comes as no surprise that this particular blog is getting lots of press from Day One.

Dan Gillmor, author of We the People, writes on Bayosphere...

Starting in 2006, I'll be putting together a nonprofit Center for Citizen Media. The goals are to study, encourage and help enable the emergent grassroots media sphere, with a major focus on citizen journalism.

I'm thrilled and honored that the center will be affiliated with two superb universities in a bi-coastal partnership.

• Here on the Pacific Rim, where I live, the center will collaborate with the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. As an I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow, I'll do a class next fall, and my principal physical office will be at Berkeley as well.
• Our Atlantic-facing partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School, where I'll be a Research Fellow. I'll visit there regularly -- at least once a month -- to work with other fellows, faculty and students. [more...]

[via Scripting News]