[Gllug] Linux Volunteering: meet up Thursday 10th October

[Jerry Bate]

I'm currently volunteering with Friends of the Earth in London, and have
done some
volunteering with Amnesty International in the past. Mostly, though,
I've done paid
work for a variety of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) over the
past 10 years.

I think there's definitely potential for setting up some way for people
to register
as volunteers, and NGOs as clients, so they can find each other. I
believe that some
sort of database, or organization, was set up along these lines years
ago in the UK,
but I've never heard of anyone using it. Its probably best to keep it
low-cost and informal.

I do like the idea of rent-a-geek. I think that what NGOs often need,
though, is just
some expert advice, which may just require a phone call or afternoon of
someone's time.
Perhaps we need an ask-a-geek service? I've started working at Friends
of the Earth on
re-implementing part of their in-house Web Content Management system,
written in Java,
and I can well imagine that I may need to call on the advice of someone
with deep Java
experience (especially re performance... this is Java :-)

>i once knew a guy that worked for a firm who were resellers/leasers in
north west london who
>happily ripped off the RNLI for about 200,000.

Sadly this sort of thing is not uncommon, in my experience. I don't know
how a rent-a-geek
service could help, but I feel it ought to, in the long term at least.

There are a few caveats I ought to point out to interested GLUUGers.
Most charities don't use open-source software, or unix. Attitdues and
policies are slowly changing, but there are some deep-rooted reasons
for this, which won't go away easily.

Secondly, charities don't have much time to manage volunteers, so they
tend to prefer people they know, who can just get on with it. They also
need people with bags of experience and knowledge, which they can't just

go out and buy whenever they feel like it. Some organizations do from
time to time take on IT "sandwich year" student placements, but I
haven't
heard of anyone doing this in the last couple of years.

>I propse somewhere in Central-ish London on Thursday 10th October
>starting about 19:30 and going on until we head home.

I should be able to make it.

> i would gladly volunteer my help to worthy charities, i am however
broke, maybe
> some rich linux/unix vendor could pay our travel costs :-)

Friends of the Earth pay my expenses provided that I'm there for at
least 6 hours in a day
(currently I get £5- travel and £4- meal). I beleive that Amnesty and
most other major NGOs
do the same.

Jerry




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