Bay Area Open Source Community: Help School Kids Go OSS on Sat. March 1 - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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February 28, 2008
Bay Area Open Source Community: Help School Kids Go OSS on Sat. March 1

I live on Cape Cod and spent so much time with an airline seat strapped to my back for 30 years that I feel no strong reason to leave.

But when I do, one of my favorite places to visit is the San Francisco Bay area. If I don’t have the days it takes to head up to Crescent City, CA, I can get a taste of the redwoods right there in Muir Woods or down in Big Basin. Head out of San Jose to the East Bay the back way for a couple of hours via Mount Hamilton to Livermore and it’s like riding in the Colorado high country. If I’m homesick for Cape Cod I can head out to Point Reyes. (If you’re familiar with Cape Cod but not Northern California, Point Reyes is a National Seashore Park the size of the entire Cape, not just its outer forearm.)

So what does this travelogue have to do with open source?

Well all you bay area open source community members have a way to keep the region "green" for when I visit. Untangle (see previous post) and the Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) have partnered to donate hundreds of open-source-software-based computers to Bay Area schools through an “Installfest” to be held Saturday March 1, 2008. They need volunteers to install Ubuntu, Firefox, OpenOffice and more on recycled computers provided by the ACCRC. The volunteers are needed in four locations: San Francisco, San Mateo, Berkeley or Novato.

To signup and volunteer for the Installfest please visit: http://www.untangle.com/installfest

By the way, if you come to Cape Cod, some folks are doing their bit to keep it "green" as well. A proposal is in review with the Federal government, supported by the Sierra Club and others, to build a wind farm in the Sound. It will provide 75% our electricity. NIMBY Kennedy, our summer-visitor U.S. senator, and his otherwise ecology-centric nephew Robert are fighting it but it looks like it will happen. But I digress from a travelogue to politics.