[CLUE-Tech] Good Karma

[Newell, Glen]

Hi everyone-

Right now I'm involved with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Denver,
getting ready to set up a new club, and dealing with a number of issues
involving using and re-using donated hardware. As some of you might know
from doing this kind of thing yourself, the available supply tends to run
the gamut from nice, almost new, or new but slightly behind tech, to stuff
that collected dust because it was pretty much useless. This brought up the
usual issues, and I thought I would toss out some questions and see what
your thoughts were.

One of the programs that BGC does is to provide computers for
underprivileged kids. They have volunteers ( IT Samaritans or someone like
that) refurbish older machines, put Win98 on them, maybe do a little
tutorial, and then wish them luck. This brings up, to me, a couple
interesting thoughts.

First, the obvious first thoughts are 'hey, we can put Linux on even *older
and crappier hardware* and get the currently 'useless' boxes into service as
'net and homework and learning machines'...this is great, but the question
of support becomes foremost in people's minds: as an open source evangelist,
my usual responses involve the higher stability of a Linux box, and any
support is community based, look for forums and online docs. This is great
for a literate adult, but schoolkids from under-educated and under-financed
homes don't have the cultural access to this level of information-gathering,
usually. Using and supporting Linux isn't hard, but its different...

I was thinking about this today and an interesting ( though I'm sure not
unique) idea occurred to me: What about a collective of people qualified and
willing to give some of their time to do the support of projects like this-
say a kid (or any new user) gets a machine as part of a program like this,
and needs some advice. They look at a little card or sticker they got with
the machine and they send an email, got to a website, or call a phone
number. Someone gives them the 10 minutes (average, probably) help required
to get them back on the right track: a kid has learned, Linux wins a new
supporter, and some Linux geek's karma has just been improved.

I'm interested to hear what everyone thinks about this...

Glen