Re: [Fsfe-uk] [Proposal] Mailing lists

[Ramanan Selvaratnam]

On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 10:42, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> Introductions: 

:-)
I was not going to bother you until next week when I would have had time
to follow things up more. Glad you are here already.

> On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 03:08:24PM +0100 or thereabouts, Ramanan Selvaratnam 
> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 12:27, Alex Hudson wrote:
> 
> > > Gnome community, I think the only person I've spoken to in the last 6
> > > months was Telsa on irc the other day. So, I don't really have an idea
> > > of what these people are doing or whether or not there are things AFFS
> > > could do to help them.
> > 
> > Yes I too exchanged mails with Telsa recently and what I understood was
> > there is a crowd  and willingness but nothing is being done due to the
> > possible administrative overheads. 
> > 
> > This is about a mailing list and if AFFS is starting to run Mailman, I
> > do not see why we should not explore this?

Apologies for the passing the wrong message through.

Now, I do not see why we should not help GNOME-UK set up stalls etc as
outlined below?


> It's a problem common to many groups, but other groups seem to 
> overcome it. We find ourselves casting about at a week's notice 
> saying "eep, there's a show, I can't make it, who can I think of 
> on IRC or whose mail I have who might be able to?" And then not 
> going, or sharing the Debian stand yet again, because Debian are 
> friendly like that (also, they have beer). We've also shared the 
> KDE stand at least once.
> 
> I think, frankly, most of us want someone else to do the organising
> of this logistical stuff, or at least to fund it. I am certainly
> hopeless at organising. I can't think of more than two Gnome people 
> I know who have a car, even. I have had my share of carrying computers 
> and monitors around on trains, and I really don't want to do that 

I think the modern requirements are to have an overhead projector
(somehow, they are still expensive and brittle) and carrying flatscreens
and VIA EPIAs or similar.
Otherwise no one might notice and space in .Org villages also look
scarce.

> any more. What we need is to find out how to get machines to shows 
> cheaply, whether local companies will do it (especially if we can 
> scrounge boxes and delivery of them), and so on. For example, at 
> LinuxTag a few years ago, the Gnome stand computers almost all came 
> from the RH Germany office, because several employees there were 
> going to attend on the RH stand anyway. So we borrowed a box or 
> two from their office, and someone turned up with a car and we 
> loaded them all up.
> 
> If we could do that sort of thing, rather than three of us
> arriving with our laptops or smallest computers on the train,
> that would help so much.

Anything in South East, add me on to the help list. ( Also to the
anti-car league too).
Also I could possibly help out at with other big events too.

At the (GNU)Linux Expo there was talk of a community based IT solutions
exhibition in Brighton, in spring.

This might proove to be a good target to aim for.
 
> 
> So the mailing list is no problem. As I said, I am setting one
> up now. Gnome's problem in the UK is just getting to the shows
> with people and equipment. Whether setting up a mailing list 
> will solve that, I don't know. We shall see.

One aspect that should be considered is the possible reach of AFFS among
non IT people who might be excellent at and interested in feedback, doc
writing and translation tasks that will always be needed by GNOME and
related projects.
 
In the case of l10n with non western languages I am aware of cases of 
enthusiastic expatriates who live in the UK, interacting with the
Unicode consortium on behalf of their languages' digital futures.
IMHO this is another central role the UK continues to play and its value
to free software should not be ignored.
Almost everyone I have been in touch on this front are very aware of the
freedom issues in software but I suspect they need to approach people
through a user friendly desktops rather than any distro or similar
pitfalls.

All the best,

Ramanan