Welcome volunteers old and new

A pleasant surprise awaited your scribe on his arrival at the Lab yesterday: one of the happy smiling faces lurking there was Mark, who had to bring a halt to his volunteering activities last year to find a job to pay the bills.

Anyway, Mark now has some spare time on his hands again and is more than willing to devote some of it to Bristol Wireless. I’m pleased to relate his interest and enthusiasm for all things open source – what brought him to Bristol Wireless in the first place – continues unabated: he’s currently wiping an old desktop at home with DBAN (news passim) and now has an up-to-date Debian network install ISO with which to experiment, mainly in order to see how Debian compares with his Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu, one of many Linux distros which Debian has spawned over the years.

Anyway, to return to the point of this post: it’s always lovely to see old volunteers call in to wish us well and perhaps get involved again. Moreover, Bristol Wireless extends a warm welcome to anyone new who’d like to volunteer with us (we’re all volunteers here. Ed). If anyone new does have some spare time they’d like to spend with us in the Lab, please remember this: excellent technical skills are not essential, although a willingness to learn new skills and share the ones you have definitely are. Indeed, if you have marketing/PR and copywriting skills you’d be particularly welcome – not that we’d turn you away if you showed up on the doorstep offering tech skills.

Finally, several of our former volunteers have progressed to very skilled, responsible or prestigious jobs; indeed the technical ones are employed right around the world. If you’re unemployed, a period of volunteering will fill what would otherwise be a void in your CV, so come on! Get in touch.