[Computerbank] Fwd: [Issues] Seeking Participants for Linux in Nonprofits Study

[Romana Challans]

anything we can be involved in?

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Subject: [Issues] Seeking Participants for Linux in Nonprofits Study
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 20:10:03 -0400
From: Michelle Murrain <tech at murrain.net>
To: techtalk at linuxchix.org, issues at linuxchix.org, grrls-only at linuxchix.org

Sorry for the cross-posting - but I'd like as many folks to see this
as possible. This is for an organization I'm on the steering
committee of. I'd really appreciate it if you spread this far and
wide in the open source community. Thanks!!
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The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) is developing case
studies of nonprofit organizations that use Linux for their office
network. We are looking for organizations with staffs of 15 people or
more. If you work or volunteer for a nonprofit of that size, that
uses Linux for networking (including file/print sharing, or as an
email server), we are interested in interviewing you about your
experience.

The idea behind the study is to convince more nonprofits to take a
serious look at Linux. While many schools and government agencies are
beginning to consider Linux as an option, awareness in the rest of
the nonprofit sector, especially small-to-medium size organizations,
remains very low. Given that these groups have very tight budgets and
share the volunteer ethic of Open Source, you would think that Linux
would be widespread among them. But so far nonprofits have been
surprisingly reluctant to embrace Open Source. When it comes to
technology, nonprofits tend to trail several years behind the
for-profit world. Although many nonprofits use Apache, PHP, etc. for
Web work, most treat the idea of Open Source in general and Linux in
particular the same way businesses did several years ago. The fact
that Open Source is now mainstream in the business world hasn't had
much impact on the way nonprofits see it.

By doing this study, we hope to show nonprofits that other
organizations just like theirs have used Linux to cut their total IT
costs (including training and support) and to create networks they
can really count on. We also hope to give them a better understanding
of what it means to run Linux vs. Microsoft/Novell networks as well
as the issues they need to think about and the pitfalls that they
will want to avoid if they moved to Open Source on the back end.

If you think your organization would make a good case study, please
fill out the survey that's available on the study's web page at
http://www.nosi.net/tco.shtml. For more information on NOSI, please
check out our web site at www.nosi.net.

Thanks,
Reuben Silvers
Anders Schneiderman
The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative
--
.Michelle

--------------------------
Michelle Murrain, Technology Consulting
tech at murrain.net     http://www.murrain.net
413-253-2874 ph
413-222-6350 cell
413-825-0288 fax
AIM:pearlbear0 Y!:pearlbear9 ICQ:129250575

"A vocation is where the world's hunger & your great gladness meet."
Frederick Buechner

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Romana Challans
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State Convenor
Computerbank Australia Incorporated, SA Branch
http://sa.computerbank.org.au/

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the 
continent, a part of the main."
(Meditation 17, John Donne)
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