Ken and I met in town ostensibly to check out a `room', which John Weaver had suggested to us. Although Ken and I were doubtful on the practicality of just a store room, we took the opportunity to discuss a few ideas with John, and Paul (surname escapes me) from the Salvation Army. Basically the SA have some large sites along Crown St, and as you can imagine, various projects with homeless youth, long term unemployed etc. Several projects came up which I think would be of interest to people who wish to help in a practical manner. The first is that the SA have just opened a cafe, and have ideas of providing an internet cafe along one wall. A second idea arises out of a previous scheme that John and Paul were involved with. They had a company called DigiTrain, which was initially to be modelled something along the lines of foodbank. >From what I understand, it went like this: The SA would select from the long term unemployed a small group of people who looked like they would benefit from computer training of some sort. I think one example John mentioned was of a late middle aged man who was an academic from an Eastern block country. Because of language problems and other, well bad luck, he found himself unemployable. Anyway, with donated computers, with a teacher, this group underwent 10 weeks of training, and put together machines. They estimate a 70% success rate, with people going on to employment, further study or other. The funding for DigiTrain was for a one off, so even with this kind of success, the project has lapsed for the time being. (I should mention that the trainer was paid pretty good rates, about the commercial going rate). (BTW the funding came from a grant to see what could be done about waste reduction wrt computer hardware) There is money there to continue on, within the following proviso. The scheme would probably be funded with the grants that are attached to recipients of long term unemployment benefits. The difficulty is that accreditation would have to be obtained, and the money is tied to outcomes (people coming off unemployment). I already have a job, and this is begining to look like hard work, so I'm not sure where this would lead to. I personally dislike projects with too much government in them (from bitter personal experience), but this is actually a project that someone could take on and make a living from. Back to the Internet Cafe. This project is nice from several points of view. The project is quite small, several weekends would knock it over pretty well. The project is a showcase: we can demonstrate the thing works and the concept can be replicated over and over. The sysadmin we think can be done by some people who've come through various SA programs, and that we can train. Perhaps there'll be some second tier support, but hey, this is the SLUG list, no? There is no getting away from the fact that this is the Salvation Army, with Christian goals. If I can presume to speak for the people I met, I certainly got the impression they preferred to show their beliefs through their deeds, and left it to people to draw their own conclusions. I also liked the approach that any successes that they had, they were prepared to share with any other organisation. So for the moment, if you're interested, hang loose. A few bits of furniture have to be organised, a few power points, and then we'll organise a day or weekend. As for DigiTrain, well any thoughts? You can certainly email Ken, myself or John Weaver privately if you wish. Thanks for being patient with this long post. Oh, by the way, not off topic, it'll be all Linux. Jamie -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
