Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Free Software Community Projects

[Dave Page]

On Tuesday 29 July 2008 15:00:43 Paul Robinson wrote:

> For what it's worth, a large group of GeekUp types are trying to get  
> involved in outreach work with kids (teaching them to code), unskilled  
> workers (ditto), graduates (teaching industry best practice) and so  
> on, with our first area in need of help - whilst I wait for the  
> council regeneration team to get back to me - being the voluntary/
> community sector. If you want to help charities now, or increase  
> diversity down the line, consider signing up here:
>
> http://geekup.org/wiki/index.php?title=Geekup_School
>
> The idea is we're going to initially run a surgery for charities and  
> the voluntary sector to attend staffed with geeks who can answer  
> questions on IT, strategy, online marketing, whatever. It would be  
> good to see some FSUK peeps there.

While this page is about people volunteering skills for a new project, there 
are already many free software / geek-oriented community projects in 
Manchester, very few of which are working effectively due to lack of 
awareness of each other and communication.

For example, there's a bunch of sysadmins working on a project at the Zion 
Centre who are lacking computers and internet connectivity; a bunch of 
refurbed old desktop computers sitting in a warehouse in Whalley Range, with 
nobody to do anything with them, and an Internet connection and project room 
in the city centre currently sat empty. I'm working on trying to combine the 
three. A lot of these projects have the non-geek skills required, such as 
funding, project management etc. but are lacking in equipment or help.

I've started work on a page at 
http://groups.fsf.org/index.php/Manchester/Projects to keep track of 
Manchester-based community projects; I'll pass it around to as many people as 
possible to get a comprehensive overview of what's going on, and hopefully 
where efforts can be concentrated and combined to do the best at bringing 
free software to the world.

Dave
-- 
Dave Page <address@hidden>
Jabber: address@hidden