Feel free to join us! For further information make sure to check out the official CASE website.

CASE President Darrell Burkey will give two presentations, Tail, Dog, Wag (1Mb pdf file) and Joomla! Web Based Content Management (310k pdf file). Darrell will also speak about domain name issues (65k pdf file) at the conference ‘web day’.

Making Links is a conference that seeks to engage interested people, organisations and groups working at the intersection of social action and IT – including community workers, educators, trainers, not-for-profit organisations, school teachers, environmental campaigners and activists.

The Conference seeks to:

• bring the community sector together to access resources, training and services, and to share ideas, skills and creative applications of technology.

• Explore the possibilities ICTs generate for communities whose voices have been marginalized and excluded from the mainstream.

• Showcase innovative, grass roots ICT initiatives in community cultural development, outreach, and e-learning.

• Build and develop networks amongst workers and activists interested in how ICT can be used to support social justice.

Computing Assistance Support & Education (CASE) will be hosting Canberra’s first One Laptop Per Child Open Day Monday 27 October 2008 3.00pm at Volunteering ACT 55 Chandler Street (corner of Chandler and Cameron Streets) Belconnen.

Pia Waugh, open source software expert and One Laptop Per Child community member, will be speaking about the success of the OLPC project around the world and the opportunities it provides for educational projects in our region.

Following the event CASE will hold it’s 10th Annual General Meeting for members.

Come and play with the OLPC XO devices on display, and find out how this unique technology is being used in educational projects around the world.

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The news gets even better now that CASE members can obtain further discounts from Dell by forwarding orders through our account manager. Contact us directly if you would like more information regarding this. It’s just another example of how we all benefit from working together.

Over the years it’s become very popular to refurbish outdated computer equipment. Organisations providing these services use the term ‘green’ to indicate that these activities help to reduce the impact computer hardware has on the environment. But are these initiatives really delivering?

Is it really a good idea to donate old computers to community groups and schools as we are often times advised? Do we really want those delivering critical community services and our children to be disadvantaged with slow and insecure technology? Consider some of the issues with outdated computers:

• Outdated equipment can be very expensive to maintain which increases the true cost of ownership

• Older equipment often times cannot run current operating systems/software and therefore is not secure

• It can easily cost more to refurbish an older machine than to purchase new equipment

• The eventual cost of recycling the equipment is typically passed on to those who can least afford to do so.

Research is beginning to show that a better approach is to build the price of appropriate recycling of the equipment at the end of it’s life, into the cost of the purchase. It’s like paying a bit more for energy produced in a manner that has less impact on the environment. But it turns out you don’t even have to pay extra for recycling when dealing with some equipment manufacturers.

The overall goal of this workshop is to ensure participants receive practical information that can be used immediately to enhance their computer network infrastructure and information systems.

The role of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and how it can be used to implement robust, secure and affordable IT systems will be discussed in a non-technical manner.

• Is your organisation’s approach to technical support reactive or proactive?

• Are your technical systems up to date?

• Are you confident that your systems are secure?

• Does your budget buy you the level and quality of support that you need?

• Can you recover from a disaster such as theft, fire or floods?

Practical answers to the above issues will be discussed during this workshop along with providing a forum for participants to express concerns and ideas. Darrell Burkey and Amanda Plowright will outline the systems and techniques that have been used by CASE to support member organisations.

CommunityLists was established with the generous support of the auDA Foudation and is available to members at no cost.

The CommunityLists project is based on the very popular open source mailing list software ‘Mailman‘. The software has been optimised for privacy and includes online web based archives that are fully indexed.

For more information or to establish a mailing list visit the CommunityLists web site.