IT Professionals

Helping The Needy Get Nerdy!

Posted by on May 7, 2007 | 4 Comments

As some of you may already know, I will be moving to Vancouver, WA (near Portland, OR) in the coming months. And one of the biggest things that has been on my mind is being sure that I will have a way to meet new and interesting people, when my schedule allows. Sure, I know Greg, but I am also looking to do a little volunteering to help get me out of the house once in awhile, too. So when I (re)-discovered Free Geek in Portland, I really felt like I would have a chance to be amongst my own.

Now some of you will likely see this as a way for some individuals to hook up with a free PC with no strings attached? Allow me to put this belief to bed right now: If you want to be given a PC, you will have to earn it. That’s right, this is an ecosystem where hard work gets you into a PC that perhaps you could not otherwise afford. Even more important, I see this as a place I can do some good work for when I am dealing with a bad case of cabin fever after moving down south. Considering my background in PC repair, I am sure that this group could put me to work in the build program. I think this makes sense considering my skills with both PC building and Ubuntu/other Linux distros.

Think this might be something you are interested in? Take a look around, there very well may be an off-shoot near you!

[tags]charity,working,ownership,time,computers[/tags]

  • http://veritastic.net Chris Rohde

    Matt:

    Will you please keep us posted about your experiences with Free Geek? I recently started the Ubuntu Florida LoCo Group (roughly 40 members now, since March) and we are trying to find a philanthropic outlet for all our ridiculous surplus parts.

    My only issue with freegeek is the built-in overhead, in that you almost need a storefront, and most definitely need full time staff. While I have no problems setting up a 501(c)(3) to handle the money, a program closer tied to something like Computers For Kids seems more up our alley.

    But since some of my members are dead set on free geek and I know nobody within the organization, it would be great to learn more first-hand info.

    Thanks dude, see you on teh twitter.

    Chris
    http://www.twitter.com/bordy

  • Jrandom42

    There was something like this in Southern Oregon called Computers2Kids. In their 2 years of existence, they refurbished and gave away over 4,200 refurbished computer systems. Their reward? Twenty-seven tons of e-waste to recycle to the tune of over $10,000 and getting robbed of all their high end systems and parts that they had prepped for 3 different schools, They shut down when the community essentially turned their back on them. Just goes to show you that no good deed goes unpunished/

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_UTZYTXPMBEYVD35YYKJM7N34PQ Karl

    What about Open Office as a free equivilant to this. And it comes witha  full arrangement of things included like a database, writer, spreadsheet, Math equation application to put equations down into writer, and a drawing program. All tied into one package and also available to mac OSX. I have seen through ITunes some remarks that iwriter was not that good. I’m slowly picking up a Mac pro. And will be eventually getting open office for the mac as well. Might be considering i writer as well if it is another small application compared to Microsoft Office Word which is rather large for any computer system that is either windows Based or Mac. Open Office is available to Mac, Windows and Linux variants. 

    • Johan

      You really can’t compare these two applications.

      Openoffice.org is a very complete office-suite, meant to create documents including formatting, imaging, and the development is focused on giving the user as much features as possible.

      IAwriter is the opposite of this: the main idea behind the product is to encourage you to start writing and keep on writing.