[Scottish] Open source advocacy with Indymedia Scotland

[Ben Thorp]

This sounds good to me.

I know Bob also talked about working with another voluntary organisation,
but I forgot to quiz him about it. However, a good point of contact would
be SCVO - the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations -
http://www.scvo.org.uk/

Previous to the early discussion about a church-based Community CyberCafe,
I think that voluntary groups and charities should be a prime target for
Open Source Advocacy: they tend to be strapped for cash, and often
(especially, in my experiences, churches and religious groups) are a little
behind on technology, and therefore not so tied to a proprietary system.
For this reason, many are still struggling with either an old copy of Lotus
SmartSuite, or Microsoft Works, as bundled with cheaper computers these
days.

(Sorry - that has gone rather OT)

Ben Thorp



                                                                           
             Steven Murdoch                                                
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Due to Bob Kerr's excellent work on getting Open Source CDs into
libraries and other Open Source advocacy projects I thought that some
ScotLUG members might be interested in publicising the benefits of
Open Source.

One possible channel would be Indymedia, who are an global collection
of groups producing independent news. There is one such group in
Scotland, and their site is at:
 http://scotland.indymedia.org.uk/

Posting news related to open source onto their newswire would get a
fair amount of readership among non-ScotLUG people, and there is also
the option for someone to write a feature, which would be put in the
middle column on the site. This would be up for longer and get a much
larger readership.

The advantages of this for ScotLUG would be some more (good)
publicity for Linux and introducing ScotLUG to new people, both in
Scotland and further afield. Also the cooperation with Indymedia
members who have complimentary skills to those of ScotLUG members
might be useful for future joint work.

There is some information about the Indymedia Scotland at:
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/scotland/static/about_us.html
and the editorial policy at:
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/scotland/static/editorial.html

For some previous technology features have a look at:
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/scotland/topics/technology/

If you have and comments or questions then please let me know.

Thanks,
Steven Murdoch.

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