[pgh-pm] Planning Open Source conferance for Governments and Non-Profits

[Barrie Slaymaker]

FANTASTIC IDEA!

Ahem.

I have contacts at several local NPOs (the Pgh. Symphony, the Pittsburgh
Public Theater, the Carriage House Children's Center, St. Edmund's
Academy, the Ellis school, the Girl Scouts), etc, so I might be able to
drum up some interest.

I'll also try to contribute talks, though I have no success stories to
tell, as you'll see in a moment.  However, I can talk about OSS in
general and what you can do with it; especially web server or database
stuff (the hard core programming we do would not be of too much
interest, I suspect ;).

The Symphony used to be (and likely still is) completely uninterested
because they get big ticket items at a significant discount or as
non-cash donations and because the like easy-to-manage systems that are
compatible with eachother (in UI and at a technical level) and with
other organizations they exchange information with.  So OSS would only
thrive at such an organization if they have a technically inclined OSS
proselytizer.  That's true almost across the board with the schools and
arts organizations I list above, though Macs do occur in the schools
more frequently than in the arts orgs.

MS Office, MS Exchange, $FundraisingPackage and Lotus Notes tend to be
major gravity wells for the arts organizations, and there are few if any
OSS gravity wells.

- Barrie

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 12:29:18PM -0800, Robert Blackwell wrote:
> Perl Mongers,
> 
> I have been working with the non profit groups ( I am President of one) and governments a lot
> lately.  Sadly I am not finding much open source.  Even worse people do not know what it is or how
> much it could help.
> 
> So I am looking for people to help put on a YAPC style conference focused on OSS and
> Non-Profit/Governments.  If anyone has any interest please let me know.
> 
> I few ideas:
> 
> Front Office:
> 
> Using the voter data with R to analyze voter patterns.
> Writing reports with http://datavision.sourceforge.net/
> Make your data come to life! with http://www.opendx.org/.
> When is the bus coming?
> 
> Back office:
> 
> How to set up  Asterisk PBX and why would I want to.
> Using Apache to host your community website.
> Storing your data in an open source database.
> CMS options.
> 
> =====
> Robert Blackwell 
> robert at robertblackwell.com 
> AIM: robertdblackwell 
> Yahoo!: robertblackwell 
> Jabber: robertblackwell at jabber.com
> http://www.robertblackwell.com
> _______________________________________________
> pgh-pm mailing list
> pgh-pm at mail.pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/pgh-pm