GoodGNUs

At recent events, when I meet new people, we naturally ask each other “What do you do?”. I’m failing quite badly at summarising my activities, so thought I’d briefly list current projects here, for reference:

1. Gaia University - IT strategy, project management, & SysAdmin, in a programme to gradually upgrade every online aspect of this international sustainability university over the next few years.
2. Social Media & the Accessible Web - the Profitable Conversations courses highlighted on the courses page. Got off to a good start last year, now lining up a number of courses around the North West for the Spring.
3. Hackspace North West - 10 months ago I started bringing people together whom I thought would be interested in getting spaces off the ground. I have done very little on this as fortunately it turned out there were plenty of people also wanting local hackspaces, and they’ve gone on to work towards getting them going. Latest steps in Shropshire & Staffordshire.
4. Credit Unions - Free Software solutions
   Should have been going a long time ago, but a key personnel hiccough has delayed things. Now we’re on the move again, and I’ll be posting announcements on the project here very soon.
5. Other financial software & local currencies…
   Next step is looking for partners to take the core of the Credit Union software, and adapt it for 3rd Sector book-keeping needs. This is something VCOs have been crying out for.
   We’re also talking to those involved with Complementary Currencies in a number of countries - something just beginning to gain ground in the UK after a brief flurry of LETS in the 80s.
6. Cloud Computing for the 3rd Sector.
   Voluntary Groups can’t host sensitive data in the USA, and don’t want to be advertised at by Google. Hoping to work with Fossbox on this, and looking for a sponsor to host the 1U server I have that was donated to the project by Blue Fountain.
7. Permaculture
   I studied for my Permaculture Designers’ Certificate in 1993-94, while also studying for the Royal Botanic Gardens’ diploma at Kew. It was the wrong time, and once back home in Montgomeryshire there was little or no work. Now I find a resurgent interest in sustainable design, and am following recent speaking engagements with more practical work.
8. IT Recycling
   M6-IT cic had a great success here, with Richard Rothwell’s Supported Family Computing project reaching dozens of families with recycled hardware, Free Software, family training, and local support, as well as broadband for people previously blacklisted by the ‘phone companies.
   Search for partners to replicate this has been unsuccessful, but it’s been a privilege to lead workshops on community recycling with ArcSpace in Hulme, Manchester, with an interesting and enthusiastic crowd of local activists.
9. Web
   Preparing new sites for local sustainability groups, campaigns, and VCOs: some Wordpress, blog-based, mostly Drupal CMS. I miss Plone, but it’s unsuitable for the quick and low-resourced sites I’m doing now.
   When a few more get finished I’ll put up some portfolio pages.
10. Blogging?
    I’m developing a horicultural/ethnobotany blog I started designing some time ago, and a *nix introductory blog for NetBook users. Once I can get a 30 hour day I’ll push these through to publication. :^)
11. Journalism - Linux User & Developer magazine recently commissioned me for a few articles. The first of these, on Arduino boards and open hardware hacking, hit the shelves a few days ago.
12. In Transition - the two towns nearest to our village are both in possession of new groups moving towards Transition Town Status. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some very interesting people, and get a chance to begin to investigate local food and power solutions.
    It’s certainly easier to work totally locally, than try to bring people together at a distance as I did at FACT’s Small Steps to Sustainability workshops. More soon here, and on Twitter.

Hope that helps fill a gap until I renew my calls-for-collaboration posts, too. As to Networking events, maybe I should print this list on a postcard?

The Association For Free Software (AFFS) has been formally wound up this week. Founded at a meeting during the 2002 Sheffield Linux Seminar, AFFS was a membership organisation for UK supporters of Free Software - as distinct from a national chapter of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which would have been more official, and less member-led.

AFFS had some great early successes, including securing donations from UKFSN (apologies for the 3rd set of initials in two paragraphs) to support UK Free Software projects. Jason Clifford’s UK Free Software Network is a not-for-profit ISP created to support the local Free Software community.

I was co-opted to the committee early on to help with projects such as campaigns to get Free Software into schools, and served as chairman for a few months before family needs and conflicts with work led to me scaling back voluntary commitments.

Sadly AFFS had problems with membership renewals, and stalled somewhere along the way. Now it has been formally wound up I hope we can look back on the successes of the Free Software community in the UK, and ponder what comes next. A UK chapter of the FSFE perhaps (the UK being the only significant country without one), or some other form of membership organisation. Does the success of the Manchester Free Software Group show the way? After all, it’s always best to build on existing structures.

Free Software Funding

The residual membership voted to distribute the remaining AFFS funds as follows:

The funds remaining in its (the AFFS') bank account have been disbursed
as follows, two thirds, £2307, to the FSFE, and one third, £1154, as a
grant, to a UK project to develop software.

In more detail, that £1154 has been entrusted to me to disburse to the Free Software projects I’m working on for the Voluntary Sector. It will be mostly used to fund financial software for Credit Unions, and to help with a project trying to provide entirely Free Software cloud services for 3rd Sector groups.

Open Collaboration

More details of the projects will appear here, as part of my “Calls for Collaboration…” posts, however here’s the basics: We have begun work on flexible, web-based, Credit Union software. Development cost is currently covered, mostly through donated time, but incidental expenses need to be met.

For cloud services I have a server generously donated by Blue Fountain Systems. We’re hoping to get donated hosting (call me on 0779 456 0714 with your generous offer), but the project has expenses to meet in getting geographically-disparate volunteers together.

By funding projects that have actually started, but are at early stages, and by funding incidental expenses to supplement voluntary and otherwise funded coding, I hope to make the community’s money go much further. For this reason I may also consider other projects that arise over the next 12 months.

Transparency & Accountability

Regular updates will appear on Twitter, with occasional summaries published here. However, to be clear on what’s happening with the money, I will publish an interim summary of progress here next summer, and a clear summary of where the money has gone at the end of 2010.

In my recent enterprises & projects I’ve tried to spread the work around as widely as possible - bringing in fellow freelancers to help with training, coding, illustration, and all sorts of technical bits & bobs. Sometimes this has been quite successful for all involved. Occasionally things haven’t worked as planned, but lessons are learned and I’ve never failed to gain something from sharing work.

Now I find myself stretched very thinly on a number of projects, mostly at an early stage, with none of the resources I had at M6-IT cic - so I find I would ideally like a shed load of people to work with. The catch? There’s no wage or fee attached to any of these projects. Previously I’ve always paid other freelancers well - up to £1000 a day. This time there’s nothing in the pot, though a number of projects look like they will bring in steady revenue to be shared. Read on for details under the individual projects, as I post details over the next few days…

[...edit...or months; more coming soon (early Spring?)...]

P2P Board

But first, an alternative. Dave Thackeray, at http://wordandmouth.com/2009/09/ultimate-business-advice-free/, suggests setting up a “virtual board” to troubleshoot & share ideas with your peers. Put simply, you find some fellow (social) entrepreneurs, and meet up every month or so to kick round the problems that are bothering you. In a group of 6, 8 or 10, someone is bound to come up with a solution that hadn’t ocurred to you.

It’s certainly something I’d love to try. I’ve been doing this informally to some extent I guess at #OpenCoffee events, co-working sessions, and many other places - but a reliably regular version with a good set of people sounds very appealing. Practically speaking, Manchester looks the best bet - but if anyone’s planning this in any other town I regularly get to [North West England, N Wales, W Mids], then please count me in :-)

This is a short post remembering Richard Rothwell, who died last Friday.

Three years ago I was made redundant from the BVSC’s MOST project, a project doing good things to get Free Software in the hands of voluntary sector organisations. Looking to carry on the good work, I pieced together ideas for a social enterprise to supply Free Software, recycled hardware, & appropriate local support and training. As I cast around for help in this enterprise, it was with great relief that I found a friend, Richard Rothwell, planning something similar, down the M6 in the Black Country. We soon merged our projects and formed M6-IT cic.

Crucial to M6’s early success was the personality of Richard Rothwell. A lateral thinker; a cynic; a warm-hearted & giving man; a contrarian; and a passionate & practical advocate for Free Software, education, & communities.

It was Richard who started the Supported Family Computing programme, diverting specialist schools’ unspent community fund to making a real difference to families on the wrong side of the digital divide, providing computers, software, broadband, support, & training to children otherwise denied such advantages in life. Richard’s no nonesense style & clear-thinking got us through bureaucratic hurdles to win early tenders, and left a deep impression in client meetings (albeit occasionally one of flabbergasted surprise).

As I have spent much of the last year on a sabbatical from M6, working on goodGNUs projects, we had not been in as close contact as previously. The last time I had spoken to him was a quick discussion on VAT matters, with a promise of a proper chat when it was all out of the way. Sadly he took his life days later, for reasons those of us left behind may never truly understand.

From the comments on http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/ he has touched many people’s lives, and will be deeply missed in circles beyond Free Software and the voluntary sector. For those who know only a little of Richard Rothwell’s life and work, take a look at the links to his many published sites and articles on http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/ - an insight into the complex mind of a sadly missed friend and colleague.

During the final weeks of FACT’s Climate for Change exhibition, our Small Steps to Sustainability workshops have moved from Gallery 1 (as an after-hours social café “combining beer, conversation, and the jagged interface between technology, networks, and ’saving the world’”), to the[FACT]blog (no beer there, I’m afraid).

This means that I’ll be posting there with the final topics, but also summing up previous workshops’ discussions. Please contact me if you want to remind me of something we covered, or that I said that I’d follow up.

Posts will be appearing under C4C Featured Blogs on the[FACT]blog,or you can get directly to them by author, or by the SmallSteps tag.

Info is gradually being updated on the GoodGNUs #SmallSteps page, too. As to the next steps, there’s something in the pipeline, but it’s a fair way off being announced yet. Why not subscribe to the GoodGNUs’ feed to keep updated?

Why am I planning to run low-cost courses on website & social media strategy? Because there is a need: not just a need for good websites, and communication strategies for social media, but just getting across the basics of awareness of accessibility.

Local groups

Yesterday I toddled around a hall in the next village, looking at the displays about local community groups. As well as trying to fend off the siren call of joining two of the local choirs (why are the rehearsals always on my busiest evenings?), I got to have some great conversations about the use of technology in local community groups.

Everyone now recognises the importance of having a good web presence, but it’s the next step that causes the problems. Groups that have got a Wordpress account have probably taken one of the simplest routes to having an easy-to-maintain, and reasonably accessible site. A more common route seems to be to buy shrink-wrapped, proprietary, create-your-own-website software. And here the problems start.

WYSIWYG?

Inside these cans-of-worms is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get - a dangerously misleading acronym when it comes to Web MarkUp) interface that churns out spaghetti HTML. Some at least try to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS, the Web Standard way, since 1999, of separating layout from content), but often in a rather perfunctory and inconsistent manner. The real problem comes with the more inaccessible MarkUp.

In the bad old days TABLES, a way of laying out data in tabular form, started being used to layout designs in precise ways for webpages. Given similarly-sized screens they do this layout job, but not only can they fail quite badly on mobile devices, they are a disaster for screenreaders. A sighted user can quickly scan a page by sections and headings, and a blind user can do the same with well-structured webpages. Inaccessible designs don’t allow the user to skip from section to section, and leave the screen-reader user bogged down in the site, having to read every word to get at the information.

The user story

With one group that had taken such an approach I gave a 10-minute impromptu workshop on the user experience of visually- & mobility-impaired users as they navigate websites that do and don’t conform to Web Accessibility guidelines, and accessibility design beyond simple box-ticking. It was very well received, and made me realise the need to reach ever smaller groups with basic information.

I had been planning a simple introduction to communication with websites & social media for local Start-Ups, social enterprises, and small charities. Now I’ve pared down the costs to reach the smallest groups, and, naturally, accessibility is at the heart of all of the information - not a bolted-on afterthought.

Courses are being planned in Manchester and Cheshire, but I’m happy to bring it to anyone in the region. See the courses page for more information.

Wednesday April 22, 2009 from 7:00pm - 8:30pm

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology)
88 Wood Street
Liverpool, England L1 4D Get Directions

A start to getting together a crowd to open a NW Hackspace in Liverpool:

Starting Weds 22 April, a fortnightly meet-up at 7pm at FACT. We may try
and meet in their media lab at some time, but we’ll start with the bar.

Adrian McEwan will bring along Bubblino (as seen on BBC ;) to the first
meeting. Format will be informal discussion after a short intro on
hackspaces.

Creative learning

One reason for choosing this coming Wednesday is that it follows
straight on from the Small Steps to Sustainability meeting on Creative
Learning - something that very much includes having fun in a
hackerspace. I hope that some people will find themselves staying on
from Small Steps for the Hackspace Meeting (or coming early to the HS
meeting, to take part in Small Steps).

Note that Birmingham hackspace combine regular pub meetings with
occasional weekend hackdays. Help us find a venue and we’ll be doing the
same.

Upcoming - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2422946/
Webpage - http://nwhackspace.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/liverpool-meeting/

Below is the text of an e-mail I’m sending to various groups with which I’m involved. Please feel free to copy & re-post, Dig/Reddit/social bookmark, Tweet it, link to it at http://www.goodgnus.org/2009/04/more-hackspace/ or just talk about it to anyone who might be interested in joining in the hackspace fun :-)

Hackspace - a place for hacking. Playful invention with hardware, from Arduino to 3D printers. As one of the hackspaces puts it: “We’re looking to create a hackerspace where anyone interested in technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate.”

There are hackspaces all over the world [1], and now the UK. A new group [2] is trying to set up hackspaces in London [3] & Birmingham [4].

Why not the North West you ask? Well, I asked anyway ;) - so now we have a NW group - come and join the mailing list [5].

Where?

Members of Liverpool LUG have expressed an interest, and want to tie it in with planned workshops & the local arduino community. In Manchester the local coworking group are interested in sharing the space. In Stockport we’re looking at a storey of a nice mill building [6], and hoping to find a community of people to join in. In Bangor there’s a social enterprise start-up that would integrate very well with the space.

Join in

If you’re in N Wales or NW England, and interested in creative, fun (or profitable) things to do with computers, or would like to link such things with social action, perhaps, join the list. These things will only work with *people* - I’m committing a little time to help get these off the ground, but it’ll only work if we all muck in.

What next?

If you just want to follow what’s happening follow us on Twitter [7], sign up & lurk on the Google Group, or wait until we set up an [announce] mailing list.

[1] http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces
[2] http://www.hackspace.org.uk
[3] http://london.hackspace.org.uk/
[4] http://groups.google.com/group/birmingham-hack-space
[5] http://groups.google.com/group/NW-hack-space
[6] http://twitter.com/broadstonemill
[7] http://twitter.com/hsNW

Some of you may be aware of efforts to produce a hackspace in London & Birmingham. A place for creative experiment with technology. Fun for its own sake, which might also lead to all sorts of great artworks, products, and collaborations.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces lists hackspaces all over the world.

Recent talk on the Liverpool LUG mailing list, about finding somewhere to hold a netbook day for GNU/Linux newbies prompted me to think beyond a single event to what the city (& Manchester) is missing - a permanent hackspace.

Mentioning it on the LUG list, then at Manchester OpenCoffee, produced some interest, so I’ve put up a list at http://groups.google.com/group/NW-hack-space/ - please sign up and make yourself known if you’re interested.

Beyond the simple joy of hardware hacking, there’s the possibility of linking it up with some sort of co-working space, possibly sharing one floor of a building. It depends, of course, on who gets involved, and what people put in, as much as what people want to take out of it.

For example, I’d be keen to look at Sheffield’s Access Space, with its Social Agenda of helping people to help themselves with IT knowledge.

FACT Gallery’s Climate for Change exhibition runs from 13 March - 31 May, 2009, and explores “how humans can be invested in the change needed to sustain civilization and examining the multiple crises affecting the world: ecological, financial, food, housing. Is society itself becoming unsustainable?”

The idea is to involve local communities, projects, people, and make links, and I’m trying to bring some of the themes of sustainability - particularly where it links up with technology - together in a series of 11 café events.

Small Steps to Sustainability poses the question “Can technology save the world?”, and looks for answers - in the face of crisis - in a more connected world

One step at a time

Each week (on the non-alliterative “Sustainability Wednesday”, at 6pm) we’ll meet in Gallery 1 with beer or coffee. A four minute presentation (in the 20:20 style) introduces the 11 themes, and the rest of the hour is open discussion around that weeks theme.

It’s called Small Steps… as it’s about both small steps we can take to sustainability, and about stepping through the themes to see how all of these things link up in different ways.

What I’d like to do is bring in local groups, individuals, and businesses, involved with social enterprise, sustainability, and the themes mentioned each week, to contribute. Particularly those already a part of Climate for Change.

Social Media

I’ll put up more detail on the workshop (including the slides) next week. At this stage I want to gauge interest in joining in: I’m sure other people have far more ideas to share than I do, so please get involved. Either e-mail me, or talk about it on Twitter (or Identi.ca) - please tag your posts #smallsteps.