Been thinking about digital access recently. A lot of the organizations that recondition and distribute computer in the community have tied themselves to corporate sponsors and forsaken open source.
I saw this with Austin Free-Net in #Austin and Free Geek here in #Portland
Now, with the forced migration to Windows 11, all that highly usable equipment becomes e-waste.
The failure to adopt user-friendly open source (such as Linux Mint) is jeopardizing #digitalDivide efforts.
The talking points Juan Muro Jr. gave at the 2023 FOSSY panel on behalf of #FreeGeek just wrenched my heart.
"People don't need skills in open source, they need jobs and jobs don't do open source."
As someone who had a continuous presence there for 14 years as a volunteer, collective member, staff, and board liason with staff...
They inherited a multimillion dollar non-profit organization and tossed the values that got it there under the bus.
Nevermind the fact that #FreeGeek was a springboard for me from being basically homeless into an world traveling (for better and worse) free software developer.
Nevermind that I met someone else at FOSSY in 2023 who their volunteering at FreeGeek landed them an engineering job at a Intel working on open source.
But because we did not properly track all our anecdotes during the organization's infancy, it was all basically worthless...
Not saying we did everything right, oh, we most certainly did not...
The #FreeGeek I miss was part mutual aid project, part hackerspace, part environmental action, part peer learning, part absurdist art project, primarily volunteer driven, and at times painfully idiosyncratic. I miss it so, so much!
I am pretty sure it is now just another charity with a dash of environmental advocacy and very rudimentary job skills training.
At least they can cross their Ts and dot their Is now.
Courtney Rosenthal
Vagrant Cascadian