I’ve just got back from a particularly engaging meeting with a network of community centers here in Boston. The Timothy Smith Network is a group to help community centers with technology education.
So firstly, the bad news. Microsoft has quite a few things going on already:
- Free Microsoft software, Windows, Office for these centers.
- Free Online training in Microsoft technologies.
- Funding and grants to Community Centers directly.
But despite the entrenched Microsoft use and the Microsoft philanthropy, there was a great deal of interest in Free and Open Source Software and in Ubuntu. So there is things we can do to benefit these centers and what these centers lack is a few things:
- Information on what FOSS is, what it means and how to teach it.
- People who are skilled in the tools who can donate their time to teach the public.
- Access to the software, downloads, cds, does it work on windows, mac etc?
- Admin skills, a place where people can go to find out how to run centers on Linux and with other Free Software
I’ll be working with this group in the comming weeks and months to try and see what we can set up. I can personally teach many technical subjects to a degree, and can bring someone up to the level of self inquiry quite easily. But it’s going to require a broader volunteer effort, they have the space, the computers, the people who want to learn. What they don’t have is skilled people with the time to teach some of those skills.