[sf-lug] March 1 St. Anthony's Foundation outreach

Thu Feb 21 14:16:23 PST 2008

hi

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 1:06 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):
>
> > No, I want to expand the pool by encouraging people to show up who
> > otherwise would not show up to either.
>
> Well, you say that -- and I'm sure you think that -- but you're
> appealing to a fixed pool of volunteers for the second of two generally
> similar events occurring at the same time on the same day, promoting
> extremely similar social goals.  I thus find it unlikely that you'll end
> up expanding the pool -- though I hope you're right.

Maybe we could look at it as 5 installfest locations, rather than four.
;-)    Just imagine that we had 5 installfest locations.  We would need to
populate all five of them.  That is effectively our situation.

> > Also, you should know that Emy Tseng of the Department of
> > Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) for the City and
> > County of San Francisco (CCSF) was at the last SAF event, and was at
> > publicity meeting tonight for the next SAF event.  DTIS is the
> > department of CCSF that is responsible for making IT decisions for
> > CCSF.  In 2003, Brian Behlendorf and Josh Berkus and Louis Suarez
> > Potts and I met with Willie Brown (then Mayor) and Lewis Loeven and
> > Rod Loucks to see about getting FOSS pilot programs for CCSF.
>
>
> How quickly they forget:  CCSF had, for many years, not one but two
> Linux computing lab installations that were clones of the CoffeeNet
> NFS/NIS-based LAN setup.

Thanks, I did not know this.  Where were those labs located?

So, they've already had open source / free software deployments that
> have gone _way_ past "pilot" status.  Multiple of them.
>

No one has ever brought that up with me.  That is really helpful info,
thanks.

> My point?  In the long term, it's futile to just hand bureaucratic
> agencies open source / free software solutions in a way that doesn't
> guarantee institutional buy-in,

+1

That is what we are trying to do.

> > IMHO, if we continue to talk up both events, we should be able to get
> > enough bodies to cover both.
>
> IMVAO, promoting the (conflicting) Tenderloin event the way you did
> was, in context, just a little tacky.  I'll just say that, as my
> personal observation, and stop there.

I really had no choice.  Kami Griffiths and Kari Gray and Karl Robillard
were not able to set the event for any other day.  But your point might be
that my delivery was off.  I am sorry if my delivery was tacky.  I have lots
of plates spinning at any one point, as we all do, and so I might
occasionally

> Maybe you should have expended the same amount of effort towards getting
> St. Anthony's Foundation to move the March 1 event to some date that
> doesn't conflict.  Again, just my opinion.

We had lots and lots of discussions about this.  My heart sunk when I saw
that both groups decided to announce for the same day.  So the question
before us, as a group, right now is how we want to respond.  IMHO, we can
handle this load.  The benefits are clear.  It's a great opportunity, and I
hope that our community sees a benefit in pulling it off, despite the
hardship.

>
> > What about Gnash?
>
> I _could_ install unbelievably RAM-hungry Gnash (or Swfdec) again, and
> figure out how to extract the download URL from CNet's nasty and
> depraved Javascript-ridden, hideous HTML, download some large Flash
> file, and watch it to verify that something you occurred that you say
> happened, and that I have no special interest in expending all that
> effort to see -- or I could just take your word for it that it happened.
>
> Which do _you_ think is more likely?  ;->
>

heh.  Well, thanks for taking my word, at least !

This is a really gnarly problem facing the Free Software community.  What do
we do about the fact that more and more of our culture is getting sucked up
into these proprietary formats?  Rick, do you just not watch video from
CNet?

> [1] I actually now see the phrase "demonstrate and install _open source_
> operating and virus protection software".  I could swear that the phrase
> "open source" wasn't there earlier today, but might have missed it.
>

Yeah, you know, I had actually not even read the announcement the entire
time that we have been discussing this issue, but now that I recall, the
flyer for the last event did specifically list Free Open Source Software
demos and help.  Below are URLs to screenshots from a flyer for the 12/15/07
event.  You will see that Free Open Source Software is specifically
mentioned on the flyer.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=digitaltippingpoint&aid=5148084977887947905&iid=5169557917908895282

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=digitaltippingpoint&aid=5148084977887947905&iid=5169557917908895298

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=digitaltippingpoint&aid=5148084977887947905&iid=5169557917908895314

I am happy to provide anyone who wants it with a copy of the PDF for the
flyer for that event.

So this group has publicized their support for FOSS.  We had a table of 5
boxes at the last event, we installed FOSS on a bunch of boxes at the last
event, and we will do the same at the upcoming St. Anthony Foundation (SAF)
event.

We will be doing the set up for the event the Friday before the event.  Set
up and prep work for the SF Untangle - ACCRC massive installfest will be
happening at the KIPP school, as will the organizing of the boxes and
monitors for the SAF event.  Essentially, we will be bringing the SAF FOSS
boxes out of the KIPP school, and in their place, we will be installing FOSS
on boxes from a file server that James Burgett is prepping at ACCRC.  James
will bring the file server and clients from ACCRC over to the KIPP school.

Thanks in advance for your support of the March 1 events!  I am sure that we
will get this all done and it should be fun and inspiring, too!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/attachments/20080221/451a0147/attachment-0001.html>