Join us for the San Francisco Net Tuesday on September 9:
Involver: How Nonprofits Can Create Video Campaigns for Social Networks.
NetSquared is an initiative of TechSoup
NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.
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Open source computing
Whew - Web Site Launch
After quite a lot of work,my consulting company, working with The Cedar Cultural Center, just released a revamped web site. (August 23) The new site features music and video, a searchable calendar, and quite a lot more.
The Cedar is a well-established nonprofit music venue in Minneapolis, and features world music, roots music, and lots of other entertainers who are not supported by the major music industry.
The site is based on Drupal with quite a few stock and custom modules. There was a lot of collaborative work involved between my company and The Cedar.
Open Source religion
Your question:
I'd love to see a really honest survey asking OS developers how often they *assume* OS is the solution - without regard to long term use, support, training ... etc. My guess is the religion keeps people from offering really VIABLE solutions versus OS for OS sake.
Incremental progress is necessary, and well underway
Your name:
Graham Freeman
Your email address:
gfreeman@compumentor.org
Your question:
The best and (IMO) only realistic way for open-source software to become pervasive and widespread in desktop computing is for the current trend of incremental progress to continue, fueled primarily by word-of-mouth. Each time someone uses Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, Thunderbird instead of Eudora/Outlook, Gimp instead of Photoshop, or Open Office instead of MS Office, the concept of open-source software gains a little bit of traction. Each time one of these substitions results in a positive experience for the end-user, that end-user's peers will be that much more likely to hear about and use open-source software themselves.
Another good method is to distribute CDs such as The Open CD or Open Source Free CD, which are collections of useful and fun open-source software packages. This is a great tool to accompany word of mouth, in that one can say "I love OpenOffice, and here's a legal, free CD that gives it to you without having to wait an hour for it to download."
On the network side, m0n0wall is an excellent open-source router/firewall/access point solution that can dramatically improve the price/performance ratio for a small-to-medium sized organization's firewall/router needs. It's not something that can reasonably be deployed by a non-techie, but it's something that a techie can use to obtain amazing functionality (with excellent usability) at a much lower price point than proprietary/commercial equivalents.
Graham
Open source screenreader
I have made it to sunny California the night before the conference - very exciting! Two things are on my mind. The first is to find my dear friend Jayne Cravens who I don't get to see much of since she moved to Germany...but she will be here at the conference - yay!
And the other very exciting thing is that I have had some great exchanges with people in anticipation of the sessions - and specifically the idea of getting some input and brainstorming around the issue of disability access to these new technologies.
Dinner: Open source computing, Monday eve
Hi, folks,
I'm a brand-new Technology Analyst at CompuMentor, and I'm excited to be working and attending the Netsquared conference this week. My on-site participation will begin with a hosted discussion-focused dinner about open-source computing, held at the Tomatina Santa Clara restaurant at 3127 Mission College Blvd. in, you guessed it, Santa Clara, California. We'll start at 5PM and wind up by 7PM.
Some helpful links:
When and where is open source useful?
Your name:
John Lorance
Your email address:
jlorance@compumentor.org
Your question:
I will unfortunately not be able to be physically present at this session... however, I would like to pose the question when/where is open source useful?
Often these discussions get quickly focused in a Linux discussion when really the most accessible open source tools are applications like OpenOffice, Firefox, Flock, and CivicSpace.
So, when does Linux make sense?
- While I'm a big fan of open source, I've not been so fond of recommending organizations use Linux. Speaking at a conference recently with a co-presenter who presented LTSP solutions ala livekiosk.com, my thoughts have changed significantly around this... especially for lab settings or settings where Internet access is the primary function...
When does it make sense to jump to OpenOffice?
- I've been "meaning" to do this myself for some time now.. I haven't since I have access to MS Office... what might move me?
How can the idea of open source be introduced to an organization?
- How do you make it make sense to switch people onto a new "browser" like Firefox? Security fear is not enough. Perhaps you need the social bookmarking, mapping, Flickr hooks that Flock provides to give people the reason to switch. So this question might examine the "hooks" to get folks to switch.
So, I realize there is more than just questions here; but I thought some context might be helpful.
John Lorance
CompuMentor/TechSoup (open source forum co-host)
