[TriLUG] guest speaker(s) for feb meeting

[Jason Tower]

we're having a kind of "joint" meeting this month, see the message 
below.  the 501TechClub folks will be meeting from 18:00 to 18:50 at 
red hat, before trilug's meeting kicks off at 19:00.  i've volunteered 
to speak but thought it might be a good idea to have a couple of other 
triluggers join me, particularly anyone who has worked with non-profit 
groups before.  if you'd like to participate, please email me offline.  
thanks,

jason

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Hello.  I used to work at Triangle United Way and headed up their
Teaming for Technology program.  We worked with you guys a couple of
years ago to sell off some networking equipment as a fundraiser.

These days, I am working at another technology nonprofit called NetCorps
(www.netcorps.org).  NetCorps, in conjunction with Teaming for
Technology and several other technology-based nonprofits in the area
have formed a group called 501TechClub
(http://list.nten.org/lists/info/501techclub-triangle).  Every other
month, we get together with technical volunteers and tech employees at
local nonprofits and schools to discuss gadgets, software, etc that can
help us in our goal of helping nonprofits.  We'd like for our next
meeting to be a panel discussion about open source alternatives.  We'd
love to have someone, or a couple of people from the TriLug come and
talk to us about Open Office, Plone, Apache, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
There is a group called NOSI, the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative
(www.nosi.net) that operates nationally to "bridge the gap between the
nonprofit and open source communities."  They have a publication called
the Open Source Primer http://www.nosi.net/projects/primer, and that's
the sort of basic presentation we'd like the TriLug speaker(s) to talk
to us about.

Most of the audience will be Windows users, but not hostile ones -
Microsoft gives huge licensing discounts, so it's the environment that
most of the audience is comfortable with, and there probably won't be
much chance in converting them to Linux, although, this panel could be
the beginning of their slow indoctrination! :) 

Shelly Bowers-Roghelia
Managing Director, NetCorps