Events

20 November 2004 - Murchison Center

Details

Category: Past Events

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Topics

Murchison Center Linux Conversion Project (by Abdul Alkalimat, Kate Williams, Jason Bechtel)

Attendance

15

Presentation Resources

Meeting Announcement (txt)

Flyer (html)

Murchison Center

Pilot Timeline v2: PDF OOo

Linux Brochure (landscape) (gzipped PostScript)

General TALUG Flyer (PDF)

Meeting Notes

Preparing for this meeting made me keenly aware of the need for some general promotional material for TALUG. We don't currently have even a single one-page summary of who we are and what we do. So, for this meeting I put together a quick and dirty summary page using our meeting flyers as a template. It is the "General TALUG Flyer" in the Resources section above. I also used the Linux Brochure Project to create some general Linux brochures for those people who have yet to be introduced to Tux. Someone really needs to take over this project...

Well, I was expecting a much larger turnout from the general community. There were eight TALUG members present (including myself), but only two non-core Murchison folk. Later, a couple of Murchison Center board members showed up and got a brief overview of what we are doing, so that was good.

Since there weren't dozens of people curious to find out what Linux was, we dropped the whole "Intro to Linux and Open Source" part. And since we were mostly TALUG members, we dropped the "Intro to TALUG" part. We gathered around a large table and went straight into an "Intro to Murchison" discussion. It was interesting hearing how it started as a response to a wave of drug use.

After learning about the Murchison Center, Dr. Alkalimat lead a discussion on how we can use this project as a launching point to improve the economic future of Toledo. There is a lot of potential here.

I'll simply include Kate Williams' summary of the meeting to say the rest:

great gathering today everyone!  thanks for coming, and for those who
missed us, we missed you. we ate your pizza for you.

for a picture, taken at the end of the meeting so a few people had already
left:

summary:

* we were talking about open source as something for all of us to get
deeper into and benefit from, through doing this project

* our project also has potential to help toledo find a way in the info
society, develop local talent and momentum in the silicon direction, and
demonstrate some possibilities re linux/apps that are very very new

* murch needs a letter of intent confirming for the people we answer to
what the talug murch partnership is aiming at

* we are pressing on with the plan version 2, recognising that our high
visibility launch will likely be 10 months from now.  so we are 2 months
into a year of practice:

        installation
        small scale teaching and use
        documentation of our efforts
        grant writing

* possible uses may be developed with:

        afterschool kids at center ...
        churches connected to murch/cyberchurch ...
        hip hop music creators ...
        skunkworks

This last one means sort of a technology-oriented business incubator.
Hosting a for-fee computer repair service was an example mentioned.

* we are looking at adding a Saturday work session alongside the Wednesday
night (5 pm - 9 pm) work session, we need to hear from Saturday folks as to
a good time

* new folks please join talug-murch list via www.talug.org

follow up Qs:

* what time on saturdays? (is it possible that 3pm is a good time, since we
were able to convene today at 3?)

* can rebecca get in touch with me so we can talk about grantwriting?

ok, bye for now

kate


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next session: Wed Dec 1, 5 pm
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