GoodGNUs

I’m at WordCampUK - a conference for WordPress developers and users. There have been great presentations, from Accessibility & HTML5 to WordPress Themes. However the real value of any conference is the corridor time, face-to-face chat with peers, and people doing all sorts of unexpected and fun things with Free Software.

WordCampUK has been a bit short on corridor time, but has made up for it with socials, and lunch-time meetings: today in particular when most of the 3rd sector people got together for a not-for-profits meetup. As promised, below are the details of everyone at that lunch, so that WordPress people working in the voluntary sector can find each other:

Not-for-Profit people working with WordPress

Name/Twitter or Web Link & region or country:

Richard Weltman, NW

Chris Middleton, Notts

Jason King, London & NW

Steve Graham, S/SW

Linda Parkinson-Hardman, SW

Chris Witham, Yorks/Derbys

Daniel Koskinen, Finland

Kristina Krause, Seattle & Kent, UK

Chris Booth, Scotland

Jag Gill, Sheffield

Alex Stuart, Scotland

Chris Murray, Sheffield

Andrew Laughland, Bucks

Richard Smedley, NW

Added in from comments & tweets…

John Adams, Glasgow

Steve Taylor, London

If you’re doing something with WordPress in the not-for-profit sector, please feel free to put your name and link into the comments. I’ve no idea if anything useful will come out of this, along the lines of Plone’s NGO group, or Drupal’s various specialist groups - I just offer this set of links up with a vague hope ;-)

Update

There’s now a mailing list for anyone helping the sector using WordPress - sign up and say hello, everyone welcome.

• The Modernization of Emacs (the most important changes i think emacs should adopt)
  Heresy? No, a collection of good ideas that would improve Emacs.
  (tags: emacs elisp coding programming ergonomics gnu)

I spent the early part of this week helping Birmingham Friends of the Earth upgrade their LTSP system; one installed by my former colleague, the late Richard Rothwell. There’s always space for a hiccough or two across a major upgrade, but as ever the excellent community-contributed documentation on the Ubuntu fora provided answers to every puzzle.

The advantage with LTSP is that this is only worked through once, on one PC, to upgrade a whole office network. For an environmental organisation like Birmingham FoE, however, there are more compelling reasons for choosing the technology.

What is LTSP?

Linux Terminal Server Project may sound like jargon, but what it means is a return to the computer mainframe days when one computer did all the work for thousands of connected dumb terminals (little more than teletypewriters) at the user end.

An LTSP installation - many desktops, one new computer

In this case the mainframe is no clanking, room-sized monstrosity, but a Quad-core Xeon with a few extra GB of RAM, and the terminals are older PCs discarded as useless, and once destined for landfill.

In this country we throw out 3 million PCs every year. The majority of which could be used in homes, offices and community centres, given the apropriate GNU/Linux install - but even the slowest and lowliest can live again with LTSP.As old computers are free, all you need is space: that spare room in the community centre can be an income-producing training room full of PCs.

Take a 12 year-old PC, remove the hard disks & fans, and plug into an LTSP network. The PC network boots from the server, finding a Linux kernel to run, then displaying apps which are running remotely and speedily on the server. Ancient PCs with only 64MB of memory sit on desks running OpenOffice.org, Mozilla FireFox & dozens of other memory-heavy programs.

Each desktop PC is drawing half the power it would with its own hard disk and the heavier load of local apps - alternatively special thin-client terminals can be used, drawing even less power: silent and cool-running. Each PC can be simply replaced with another without fuss, as all of the apps and data are on the server.

There’s now just one computer to back up. One to upgrade. Any user can sit at any desk and have all of her e-mails and docs there - ideal for busy organisations with many volunteers, or in education.

A footnote

Many times LTSP enabled some schools (such as Skegness Grammar School in the UK, and the Spanish region of Extremadura) to massively expand their IT provision, while saving money. In the case of Extremadura, this meant one PC per 2 pupils in every classroom, and 2 weeks for 2 people to update 80,000 desktops!

After a decade of opposing attempts to introduce Free Software systems like this to UK schools, the quango BECTA met with its demise this week. We now have the chance to get more IT, more freedom, and better learning opportunities into school for less money & lower power consumption. Perhaps it’s lucky that the money ran out before the education budget got committed to “An iPad for every child”?

LinuxUser & Developer, issue 86, just came through the letterbox. I flicked through and a reader’s letter caught my eye - not because it called my Arduino article “wonderful” <blush>, but for its links to CopyLeft hardware resources.

Small Form Factor, Free Software, Open Hardware - 3 out of 3 for the NanoNote.

QI-hardware, producers of the Ben NanoNote, and the MilkyMist One boards are all projects deserving much wider publicity within (and beyond) the Free Software and hardware hacking communities. I’m certainly very tempted by the NanoNote.

Thanks to Wolfgang Spraul of QI Hardware for writing in to LU&D with the links.

Picture Credit: http://sharism.cc/ - licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Last week, I found myself writing (to a very tight deadline) an article on the Arduino board - and how it has led to a new sort of participation in Open Source, bringing more people from a range of backgrounds to playful & creative fun with technology.

The article will appear next month in Linux User magazine #84 [to be published 18 Feb 2010]. In the meanwhile here are links to some of the really cool projects that I found in the course of knocking out the article.

Where to buy one

http://www.oomlout.co.uk/

http://www.earthshinedesign.co.uk/

http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Buy

http://www.sparkfun.com/

http://www.tinker.it/en/Projects/TinkerKit

robot kits that were integrated with arduinos at Howduino:
http://kre8.com/

Or make Your own

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware
http://arduinofun.com/files/byoa.pdf
http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/

Basic info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino [a technical article]

http://arduino.cc/

Of course, you can Google for Arduino, Freeduino, Howduino, & Hackspaces. :-)

Learning

HOWDUINO: http://www.howduino.com/

http://tinker.it/en/Teaching/

http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/

The complete beginner’s guide to the Arduino

Projects

A. Wearable

LilyPad - Arduino in wearable form

The LilyPad: http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/

Leah’s Lilypad Lecture: http://www.smm.org/ltc/node/175

The bike vest: http://www.mykle.com/msl/?p=10 & http://speedvest.com/

V&A Smart Clothing Course

B. Music

Cake Orchestra & mark II & see the video

Theremin as a Capacitive Sensing Device

Theremin controlling xylophone - AKA ThereXylomin

C. Power Monitoring

Power monitoring

http://www.pachube.com/

http://homecamp.pbworks.com/

D. Around the home

Multi-channel-ambient-orb

The amazing Weasley Clock

Arduino, Stepper Motors, Weasley magic

James Devine’s Arduino Laser Projector

E. Practical

Camera remote:
http://www.fizzpop.org.uk/blog/nikon-dslr-ir-remote-project/
http://benosteen.tumblr.com/post/253208029/ir-control-for-a-nikon-d60-updated
http://www.bigmike.it/ircontrol/index.html
Vivarium temperature monitor

F. Fun

The Flock Clock & others….
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/arduino/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Flock-Clock/

hallowe’en is a popular excuse for Arduino family projects in the USA.

But here, and for Ben Tappin, it was an 80s party

http://www.thingiverse.com/oomlout

Misc

All sorts of links:
http://howduino.pbworks.com/PossibleProjects3

http://howduino.pbworks.com/Project-DisplaySharing

http://www.instructables.com/tag/?q=arduino

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=DIYbio

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=growduino

And big thanks to

Asa Calow, Cyberspice, James Devine, Hwa Young Jung, Lady Ada, John McKerrell, Nick O’Leary, Pindec, Ben Tappin, Aisha Yusuf, everyone on the various UK hackspace mailing lists who helped, & special thanks to Adrian McEwen.

EDIT - CopyLeft Hardware

Some great links from Wolfgang to CopyLeft hardware appeared in response on the LU&D site’s article. See also http://www.goodgnus.org/2010/04/open-hardware-copyleft/

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.

Following a discussion on the GeekUp mailing list, Guy Dickinson took it on himself to get a bunch of geeks together in a panel to help out third sector groups with their problems. MDDA was the venue, last Friday afternoon.
Straight on to social networking, with the announcement of a FaceBook group to take the idea beyond a single event, and expand the conversation. Then conversation on one of the recurring themes of the day. how do you build a community online, a bulletin board for example that will be populated by active citizens, rather than the sound of tumbleweed blowing through?
One comment per hundred reads was given as a good ratio for blogs, and talk centred on existing, organically-arising groups, and how to get them into a charity’s site - begging the question, is the site the right place? Google groups were mentioned as a good “in” - most are comfortable with e-mail.

Personality

One panelist (Tom?) mentioned personality, and the need to engage with your constituency, not simply publish at them. Something to which I returned a number of times over the afternoon. Particularly later, when we went further into social media. Obviously this included twitter [# link], and Paul Webster in the audience, as well as others, were twittering throughout.

At M6-IT we’ve long worked to get improved IT knowledge, and an understanding of IT strategy into the sector. Something re-iterated as many groups present spoke of their negative experiences with poor websites, reluctantly updated by contracted techies who were holding their data and domain nams to ransome. For larger groups I suggested getting a consultant to draw up a spec doc for any IT project, and being clear on the desired outcome. For small groups there are answers, and we should pick up on this through the FB group.

Resources

With a number of organisation geeks on the panel, GTD soon came up, along with Inbox Zero, in answer to concerns about drowning in e-mails, and having no time to consider Twitter. Project management resources were discussed, and the Getting Real PDF from 37 Signals was recommended.
Google Apps was given as the answer to many a question, including Google Analytics for monitoring and analysing visitors to a charity’s website. Google apps can be used to manage a domain, pointing to wherever you move the hosting, providing online spreadsheets, and spam-filtering e-mail.

Technology was pitched at an appropriate level, with Paul Robinson kicking off a round of praising paper-based communication and notes.

Quo vadis?

A lot was packed into two hours, and there is little doubt about the appetite of parts of the third sector to get the best out of Social Media, and the latest IT tools. Indeed the gathering contained a disproportionately high number of Social Media users. Next task, perhaps, is to reach the orgs which wouldn’t self-select to attend a techie event, possibly by piggy-backing on a non-techie 3rd sector event, such as something from VA Manchester or GMCVO?

After the event, Paul Webster came up and mentioned the Social Media Surgeries with which he’d been involved in Birmingham. Another avenue to explore - if you are interested, please sign up to the FaceBook group, and join in.

Special thanks to Guy, not just for getting things of the ground, but for the excellent meal at Red Chilli afterwards, where a Chinese couple at the next table helped me explain veganism to the waiters and managers, as I’d left my Vegan Passport behind.