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(Pre)-Announcing Debian Subproject for Nonprofit Organizations



Greetings,

We're sending this message to alert developers of a potential Debian
subproject aimed toward desktop use in non-profit organizations,
particularly small ones. We're also hoping to poll the interest for
such a distribution -- especially from potential developers who might
want to collaborate with us on the project.

Over the last few years, we've dealt extensively with small non-profit
organizations engaged in grassroots organizing, technological
assistance, independent media, and educational work in a variety of
areas.

We see non-profits as a particularly important area to launch a
subproject because many of these non-profits are already familiar with
free and open source software, philosophies and development
methodologies. If they are large and technically involved enough to
need their own server, they probably already use GNU/Linux. However in
day-to-day operations most use proprietary operating systems. Unlike
many groups of users where advocacy is an uphill battle, many
non-profits *want* to use GNU/Linux on their workstations but are
waiting for someone to "make it easy for them." We want to do just
this.

By putting together a sub-distribution that fulfills the needs of
non-profits and pitching it as a solution *for them*, we hope to get
many small organizations interested in the project.

Most of these groups use their workstations for a limited and
predictable set of tasks that include many areas of overlap with other
sub-projects (word processing, book-keeping, email, maintaining
contacts) plus other more specialized uses (fund raising, developing
membership lists).

With this project, we aim to create an easily installable customized
Debian distribution with the needs of small non-profits in mind. In
the future, we'd also like to develop several new applications geared
to replace programs many non-profits use that are only available on
proprietary operating systems.

If you are interested in this project, please don't hesitate to read
our web page[1] join our preliminary mailing list[2] and contribute on
our wiki pages[3]. If you have experience with development
(development in Debian in particular) and are interested in assisting,
PLEASE email us our or our mailing list. Micah and I know that we
cannot succeed this project alone won't start "official" work until we
have enough people involved to know that we can do this correctly and
successfully.

If all goes well, you'll hear more from us soon.

Regards,

Benjamin Mako Hill <mako@debian.org>
Micah Anderson <micah@riseup.net> (NM)


[1] http://nonprofit.debian.net
[2] http://lists.yukidoke.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-np
[3] http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?DebianNonProfit

-- 
Benj. Mako Hill
mako@debian.org
http://mako.yukidoke.org/


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