[Lancaster] Last night's meeting . . .

[andy baxter]

Hi jonath,

Sorry not to reply to this sooner, but my life has been a bit chaotic 
lately and most of my geek energy is going into keeping my part time job 
together and doing a bit on my own projects.

I think something like this would be great, but at the moment I don't 
have much spare energy to help get it together. I could do some bits, 
but probably not that much.

Like you said, a couple of months ago I was thinking about setting up a 
wordpress training course, to be run by myself and a friend, but I'm 
going to have to put this to the back of my mind a bit. I did get as far 
as asking the Gregson what they thought about the idea of putting out an 
advert for people to donate 2nd hand laptops to them, to be set up by us 
and used as a community resource, as well as for the training sessions, 
and the person I spoke to was pretty enthusiastic.

Sorry not to be more enthusiastic, but I'm having to be careful with 
what I take on at the moment.

andy

On 02/06/11 09:30, jonath wrote:
> Me, Andy and Dave turned up. Mark popped in briefly. So at least I can
> put three names to faces, as it were.
>
> Anyway . . . it seemed like much was discussed last night but the main thing:
>
> Andy was talking about setting up some kind of Wordpress training
> sessions, just covering the basics of setting up a web-site, perhaps
> aimed at the novice users. I then mentioned my idea of setting up some
> kind of computing help and support session, and perhaps how Andy's
> Wordpress training idea could emerge from that. Andy could probably
> elaborate further as to his plan, but I'll go into detail about this
> 'help and support session' idea that I've come up with.
>
> For a start, it probably needs a snappier title but the idea is this:
> we hire out a room somewhere (The Gregson?!) for an evening where we
> have some kind of open session, whereby people can wander in with
> their computing problems and we try to help them out. We'll have a few
> PCs / lap-tops set up and working with some flavour of Linux; I reckon
> Ubuntu, as that seems to be the easiest to get set up and working.
> Perhaps also we have a few very basic PCs available for sale . . . I'm
> thinking the kind of PC that people usually take to the tip, but which
> would work perfectly well with Linux installed . . . although perhaps
> if we've obtained these PCs for free, we can give them away for free
> too (?!). See, I reckon there must be hundreds of people in Lancaster
> for whom: can't afford a PC, have some kind of hideous virus/malware
> infested Windows-based PC, have a PC but want to do more with it, etc.
> I guess being a Linux User Group, we would be highlighting the
> benefits of using Linux, but I wouldn't want this to be the focus and
> if people had problems / queries about their Windows-based PC, we
> would try to help out.
>
> When I explained the above to Dave and Andy, Andy mentioned that
> similar things have been set up in other cities (I think Manchester
> was mentioned), so it might be good to arrange a trip out.
>
> Anyway, I just wanted to see what everyone else thought of this idea.
> Bad idea? Good idea? Is it possible? Worthwhile?
>
> jonathan
>
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