[conspire] Box needed for open source demo

[Christian Einfeldt]

On Thursday 05 May 2005 15:52, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at earthlink.net):
> > I have set parameters that I will not spend a dime on boxes to
> > give away, because I am trying to scale this up globally.  I am
> > hoping that we will be able to develop a web site which will
> > help people from all over the planet coordinate the
> > canibalizing of computers to share parts that would otherwise
> > go into landfill.
>
> It's a worthy goal.  But who pays the cost of transporting those
> parts to the coordinating volunteer, and then of storing them
> pending deployment, and then of sending the refurbished computers
> to elsewhere on the planet?

There are several different scenarios here:

I am imagining that, at the beginning, most of the exchanges 
coordinated through DIYparts will be done local to local.  So for 
example, in the case of my first visit to your house (thanks again 
for hosting!), it would be possible for me to plan what parts I 
needed to bring with me, or what parts you wanted to give away.  
Then we could have discussed it on this list, and figured out the 
most optimal uses for the various parts.

In other words, I am planning that in the early stages, this 
DIYparts site will be used mostly to support individuals in small 
group sessions like we had at that CABAL meeting.  In those cases, 
there will be very little transportation costs.  I am hoping that 
people will in various Linux communities around the world will get 
into the habit of using DIYparts, or someone else's site for that 
matter, to organize their own parts that they have at home.  For 
those people who are planning to get together anyway in small group 
meetings, they will have a means to coordinate stuff before or 
after the meetings.  

I personally use some of the links that I have put up on the Digital 
Tipping Point site as a way of remembering links that are important 
to me.  It's sort of like Del.is.ci.os, a way of sharing 
information.  If people will inventory their own stuff that they 
have at home, other people can dig their drawers, so to speak to 
see if someone else has stuff that the other person needs.  Think 
of it as making your computer parts junk drawer publicly available 
on the Net.  

>
> You may recall that I had a bunch of very small (by today's
> standards) hard drives, a while back:  You said it was a shame to
> discard them, but you're in San Francisco with no car, and I'm
> 100 km south of you. Any means of transporting those drives to
> S.F. would have involved costs greatly in excess of those drives'
> tiny fair market value.

+1

So that is not a good use of DIYparts.  You don't make a special 
trip for that purpose.  But for example, if Daniel were to come to 
the next CABAL meeting, and I couldn't make it, I might ask Daniel 
if he felt like getting some parts from you, and then maybe next 
time he and I got together in SF, he might bring those parts with 
him.  Of course, that would only work if Daniel, or David, for 
example, were interested in doing that, etc.  

So my primary goal with DIYparts is to sharply reduce the 
transaction costs of exchanging these small parts.  It is such a 
nuisance to stop what you are doing, go dig out a part, etc., 
whereas if I can get people to take an hour or so on some weekend 
day or evening, just go through their computer junk drawers, and 
list those parts on DIYparts, then people in their affinity groups 
will snoop into each other's drawers and make a request for this or 
that part.  At least that is the hope. 

>
> The reason I wanted to get rid of them is, of course, that no
> only do I have no use for them, but also because Peninsula rent
> is high, and the drives weren't justifying their pro-rata storage
> cost.  Your own rent/ft.^2 situation in S.F., in that regard, is
> probably comparable if not worse.

Yes, that's true, and my office is famously messy because of it.  So 
doing stuff like this will not work for everyone.  But then again, 
I only need to convince a very very small percentage of computer 
users to use this system to hit critical mass.  I mean, if I can 
get a few thousand people in several major cities on any given 
continent to use this service, then DIYparts will be able to 
effectively supporting the kind of OSS community building that I 
was hoping it would support.

Let me give you a history of DIYparts.  In 2001, a Linux sys admin 
built a box for me out of parts that I bought on the Internet.  It 
became immediately clear to me that OSS posed the potential to 
vastly change how people communicate, by permitting ordinary people 
to route around many corporate lock downs on communications 
technologies.  

Ever since then, I have been talking with everyone I meet about how 
good OSS is, and why they should use it.  The primary obstacle that 
I have encountered in getting people to switch is that no one wants 
to be the first guinea pig.  OSS is still just too new to everyone.  
Geeks love it, of course, for all the obvious reasons, but other 
people in my sphere, simple end users, have no historical parallels 
in their lives.  They are suspicious of free stuff.  They have 
become accustomed to Microsoft and Apple, and they have little 
incentive to change.  

I can understand their hesitation.  I am fanatical about freedom, 
democracy, and decentralization of control, and yet even I was to 
anxious about having to sink hours and hours into learning a new 
technology to want to switch.  I would have been perfectly willing 
to believe Microsoft's "get the facts" campaign about how costly it 
is to switch to open source, due to "lack of interoperability", 
"incompatible standards" etc.  

What really tipped me toward using OSS is that I was able to 
actually test out open source on a computer that was safe and would 
not "harm" my old computer.  You have to remember that all most 
people know is Windows, and how frustrating it is to deal with 
Windows.  They think that all computers are the same!  They have 
come to expect sky high prices; threats about illegal copying; 
viruses; spyware; blue screens of death; and they're not willing to 
lose more time to computer headaches, especially when they get 
charged a dollar per minute if they are late in picking up their 
kids from day care.   To suggest to them that they can get all the 
applications that they need in one or two or five CDs, and that 
those CDs are either free or cost only about $80.00 or so is not 
credible.  They think that you are a wild revolutionary, or a long 
haired freak, etc etc.  

Even labor lawyers, tenant lawyers, immigration lawyers with whom I 
speak about computers and freedom look at me as if I am nuts when I 
tell them that they can help their constituents by giving away 
computers.  

So I have found the greatest success in getting OSS into new users' 
hands by offering them a dirt simple solution.  Plug in the 
computer and use it.  That simple.  

>
> Then, someone has to pay to get such parts to (e.g.) Brazil --
> unless, say, you know some technophile in the merchant marine who
> deadheads empty freighters to Sao Paulo.

Sao Paulo itself is a city of 16 million people, and there is, of 
course, a vast difference in the wealth of city residents.  
Presumably, the local to local scenario could work there. 

>
> I'll be delighted if the economics of all this works; I'm just
> not clear on exactly how.

This is just giving people a way to reduce the transaction costs of 
tracking otherwise useful equipment which has low commercial resale 
use, but significant re-use value for those in need.  People are 
more likely to give if it is easy for them to do so.  Hopefully, 
they will consider it easy enough to spend 5 minutes to just 
register and type in a description of their computers and computer 
parts, if they only have one thing, or at worst, in the case of say 
Rick Moen, who might have more stuff, say one hour to type in 
descriptions of his stuff.