March 2008 — News
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Open Source Computer Donation Program Aims To Go Nationwide
"Normally we do between 24 and 50 machines a month. We're still doing the final count, but we pulled off at least 300 [on the day of the event]," Burgett told us Tuesday. That's not just 300 computer donations; that's 300 machines pulled apart, put back together, cleaned, accessorized, and loaded up with software by volunteers in a one-day effort. "We're looking at probably the equivalent of six months of production in a single day."
What made it work was an outreach to individuals and organizations in the area.
"This event was different because we were calling on the Linux users in the San Francisco Bay Area to come to specific locations in order to increase the rate at which we do [refurbishments]," said Andrew Fife, marketing manager at Untangle, which specializes in open source security solutions, including Web filtering, virus and spam blocking, and intrusion prevention.
Several user groups in the area were solicited and contributed significantly to the effort. These included the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group, the San Francisco Linux User Group, the Bay Area Linux Users Group, and the Peninsula Linux Users Group. Other contributors to the event include Creative Commons, which packaged together content for the systems (including multimedia content); No Starch Press, which contributed a PDF copy of its Ubuntu for Non-Geeks for every system; and Archive.org, which at the last minute showed up to contribute servers to be used in the next Installfest. (Archive.org, incidentally, operates the "Wayback Machine," one of the most significant and unsung resources on the Web, containing archives of some 85 billion Web pages from 1996 to the present.)
Volunteers work to refurbish systems at Installfest I. More images from the event (with more entertaining captions) can be found here.
As of this writing, the finished machines from Installfest I are undergoing final quality testing and will be rolled out to schools soon after that's concluded.
Extending the Initiative Nationally
The March event worked so well that ACCRC and Untangle now want to hold similar events on a quarterly basis and expand the concept beyond the Bay Area this summer.
"If we can rally the community around it, what we'd really like to do is turn this from a regional Bay Area event into a nationwide event," said Untangle's Fife. There are some logistical considerations, Fife said, since it wouldn't make sense to have a huge volume of computers from around the country shipped to California, then sent back out to their states of origin. "If we're able to get all the logistics in place, what we'd like to try to do is try and coordinate with local Linux user groups and local schools to try an keep those machines locally and then [aim] for much, much bigger numbers."
Open Source Efficiencies
Burgett said the idea is not just to give kids growing up in poor school districts access to the same technologies that are available to students in wealthy districts. For Burgett, that would be aiming too low.
"We're going to do better," Burgett said. "The technology that's going into schools is not the most innovative technology out there. The conventional wisdom is not the most beneficial to the community. And what's actually happening in wealthy schools is ... expensive and inefficient solutions are being adopted. We're leaner; we're meaner; we're a whole lot [more] targeted toward the students.... We'll actually be putting better computers ... in some of the underprivileged schools than the more affluent schools are currently buying."
