[sf-lug] Hello! Just moved to San Francisco from Boston...

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi Kristian

On 9/15/07, Kristian Erik Hermansen <kristian.hermansen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I just wanted to introduce myself.
>

Pleased to meet you.  There are two projects that I am involved with that I
would like to tell you about.  First, I am producing a community-based
documentary film about FOSS using FOSS collaborative methods and tools.  The
film is called "The Digital Tipping Point: buzz".  It's called buzz because
that was the name of the first Debian release, and we are code naming our
iterative films after the Debian releases to honor them.  We probably will
change the name upon release.  The first documentary basically is the story
of my travels to 5 nations and 3 continents while shooting this film, and
then I come back to San Francisco and I use what I learned in my travels to
support a public middle school with FOSS.

So the second project is the school project that will appear in the film.
75% of the kids attending this school come from households with incomes
below the US federal poverty guidelines.  And yet, this school recently
scored first city-wide among public schools based on standardized testing.
65% of our students are African American; 17% are Latino; 10% are Asian; 8%
are Caucasian.

The question for the school project is: how will we move the teachers to
FOSS?  The principal is leery of moving the mission-critical functions to
FOSS, and many of the teachers don't want to re-learn.  But there is a
thin-client lab running edubuntu; and there are 10 PClinuxOS boxes in
classrooms for student word processing and Internet research; and there are
two video-capable boxes that are awaiting use as video production machines.

If you are bored and are looking to volunteer for a project, either or both
of these projects might be interesting to you.  For the Digital Tipping
Point, we need rough video editors; video compositors; directors;
transcribers; grant writers; sys admins; animators; audio technicians; and
web designers.  We have shot 350 hours of broadcast-quality video, and have
interviewed the Mayor of Munich; the Culture Minister of Brazil; Richard
Stallman; and of course, lots of our local LUGers.

For the school project, I need to have someone help me maintain the project,
just in terms of supporting teachers in class; training students to be sys
admins (basic stuff); and we really need help virtualizing Windows <choke>
on the two video-ready boxes, because Adobe has poked its nose into our
lives here and paid the school $7,000.00 to use its proprietary software,
for which it has offered to give us free licenses.  The real hook there is
that one of the teachers believes that Adobe will return next year with
further grants, provided that the teachers actually use the Adobe software
this year to do the video stuff.  Of course, the Adobe software runs only on
Windows <cough>, and so we will need to virtualize Windows so that it
doesn't get in the way of us doing other stuff.

So there is no need to feel bored or lonely in San Francisco. And those are
only the two projects that I am most familiar with.  There are plenty of
opportunities to have fun and do some really good work too.

Our video lives here:

http://archive.org/details/digitaltippingpoint

Our keyword search index page is located below.  It is the place to go to
find specific persons or themes for our footage.

http://tinyurl.com/yluwoc

Our public middle school is located conveniently in the middle of San
Francisco with lots of convenient parking.  The address is 1430 Scott
Street, San Francisco, 94115.

-- 
Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point <http://digitaltippingpoint.com>
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