NGO

I’m going to take a leaf out of Michael’s book who wrote a great blog post about the 24h madness our team was involved in last week. Many people supported us throughout the event. Friendly comments on IRC and social media, text messages from friends, people helping to organise the event and many many people who donated. I’d like to thank everyone who made this possible in whichever capacity. I explained already why donating to Oxfam is a good idea, but I want to mention it again: everybody who donated did a good job helping people around the world to have to worry less and be able to grasp opportunities....

So the Ubuntu Community Charity Marathon is in full swing and we are just getting into the 14th hour. We had a number of challenges posted already: Nick is going to write a manpage for Debian for every 5 donations he gets which have ‘Debian’ in the comment. Daniel is going to send patches to Debian for every donation with the word ‘Debian’. Jono is going to shave his beard off if he hits £3000....

On 4th October everyone on our team at Canonical will work for a solid 24 hours period and stream it live to the internet. It will be hard, but it will also be lots of fun and we do it to raise money for charities. We all picked different ones and you can get more info about each of us on the Marathon page. So a few friends already asked me: “Why Oxfam?...

I’m very happy with the plans of the Ubuntu NGO team this cycle. In short we want to: have more regular meetings - once a month get an overview of NGO-related blueprints in maverick (http://hexmode.openweblog.com/538142.html) come up with specific questions for interviews work on stats/feedback from the interviews - find out what works very well for NGO - tools they’ve built on their own put together spec and blog, post to mailing list announcing Manifest and create branch to make it easier for others to contribute document set-up and install for common applications for NGOs create Facebook group investigate if there’s “NGO Planet websites” somewhere find list of groups of websites and list of organisations See if NGOs would consider document their work - best practices If you’re interested in stuff that non-profits, NGOs and charities do, in Ubuntu and making the world a better place....

You probably heard “Computers without internet are no fun” or “Linux/Ubuntu without internet is no fun” before and your might have had the same feeling the last time your DSL provider hat an outage. Fact is that a lot of areas around the world don’t have a chearp, reliable or fast internet or no internet at all. Ubuntu is used in those areas. The Ubuntu NGO team is trying to make life with Ubuntu easier for organisations working in those areas....