[CLUE-Talk] IT Samaritans: Linux Adjunct?

[Jed S. Baer]

Howdy-Hi Friends and Neighbors!

I attended the IT Samaritans meeting last night. It's very M$ oriented,
but they have some pretty good reasons, at least given what I know about
the state of Linux warez, and free/open alternatives. I'd like to prove
them wrong. Maybe some CLUEbies can help.

Here's the deal. They are orienting towards short projects, and also short
individual involvement in projects, which means that any given piece has
to be done in a way where startup time is minimal, and transitions from
one person to the next are easy. To that end, they find it advantageous to
deal with wizards and templates. Their chosen template environment for web
pages, for example, is Micro$quash Publisher. One of the reasons why this
is important is simply that there are far more M$ type techies around than
Linux/Perl/PHP/etc. types.

So, there are two prongs here. One, get more un[der]employed linux types
involved in the group. Two, identify or build analogous "starting points",
and come up with a way to address the issues of project continuity and
supportability. I think this is an educational issue, and IT Samaritans is
by decision not a "tech education" group.

Along the lines of the K-12 project, I think that getting Linux into the
non-profit arena could be beneficial in various ways, and, as IT
Samaritans is trying to do, advocacy, from and "enlightened self-interest"
direction, can have side benefits of making contacts for employment. I'd
like to think that the non-profits would also like to lower their TCO.

Thoughts?

later,
jed
-- 
We're frogs who are getting boiled in a pot full of single-character
morphemes, and we don't notice. - Larry Wall; Perl6, Apocalypse 5