Hello. I'm Enrico Zini, italian, Debian devel, involved in various kinds of nonprofit organizations for at least 5 years. Lately, I'm working with other people (http://www.bfsf.it) to provide computing infrastructure to the local Civil Society movements, with nice results. Having been a lot with Mako in the last weeks, I got to know debian-np quite early and followed the list right from the start; I still haven't written anything because I was quite occupied in the LinuxTag/Debcamp/Debconf tour. Now I'm home again for a couple of weeks, before leaving for Tunisia were I'll go set up computing infrastructure and give computer courses together with Pro-Digi (http://www.pro-digi.org). I'm quite excited by debian-np, and not just for technical reasons: from my experience, many CSOs work isolated from each other, with some person taking care of their IT systems. This person often restarts building infrastructure and programs from scratch, because he's not much in touch with other similar efforts. The proprietary software model also helps in this isolation, having spread the idea that software is something you don't share. Before being excited for the technical marvels that we'll be able to produce[1], I'm excited for the coordination role that Debian-NP is likely to have: in less that 1 month of life, the list has already been used to exchange experiences, program evaluations and saving people a lot of time. This is something I feel was missing before, and I'd like to see more in the future: there are a lot of CSO with similar needs scattered around the world, and they now have a place to merge efforts. An example: the italian fair-trade shops are now planning a rewrite of their accounting and management software in Linux. It's a new development effort, that might as well strike the interest of other non-profit shops around the world that might like to provide ideas and code. And having a world-wide place for discussion might also mean that those devels might get in touch with, why not, indian people that are writing software to print lables, and they might both design their software in a way that they can interoperate. And then, being a world-wide list, we have international know-how: we can share translations, or we can get translations of software that's not written in a language we understand, for example: http://www.direto.org.br/ (A replacement for MS Exchange) http://teleduc.nied.unicamp.br/teleduc/ (Distance teaching environment) We are all used to bring software from the global to the local: we now have an occasion to work the other way round. Cooperative work means that if I have a field of apples that produces 1ton of apples a year, and you have a field of apples that produces 1ton of apples a year, in total we have 2tons of apples a year. But if we work together in growing those two fields of apples, sharing our knowledge, we might end up with 3tons of apples a year. I'm convinced that CSOs are in great need of this kind of magic, and that debian-np might be the place where it could happen. Ciao, Enrico Notes: [1] and we will, because there is some really interesting new technology coming in to help easily build great Custom Debian distributions -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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