Projects Update

Sometimes this site looks like there is nothing going on so I thought I’d give an update on what has been going on the last month since the Wireless Festival

Bannerman Road School

We have arranged for the BuildIT project to refurbish the machines for the Bannerman Road school project. This is group of young people based at The Park in Knowle who are doing an accredited practical course in building and maintaining PCs. We have volunteers who are going to work with them to teach them about Open Source software and networking.

This morning we took 20 machines, donated by the Institute of Physics Publishing, (again, thank you very much) up to Knowle. The average spec of the boxes was 450Mhz processor,16GB hard drive and 128MB Ram with a 17" monitor. In 2 weeks time we will take possession of a second more powerful batch of machines (800Mhz/40GBHdd/512MBRAM !!).

Next stage is to consult the prospective parents and raise funds for wireless adapters/APs and aerial equipment. Volunteers to be involved in this stage appreciated.

Bannerman Rd school have already raised funds for training (with translation services).

Easton Residents Network

TallPaul and Matt Leonard are leading this project. There is an action plan of activities around this work for August on the wiki – a prize to the first person to post the link below 🙂

Training

The training has come to a temporary halt because we have not been very successful at recruiting, we are looking to tapping into an existing Community Education facility as a possible part of their outreach work. BenG is working on delivering the existing course with the Sure Start initiative. Anyone who has any ideas around relaunching the training would be more than welcome at the next business meeting.

Other bits and bobs

According to the minutes of the last meeting there needs to be an organised finance and fundraising strategy developed and we should have a meeting to get this off the ground. Soon. Perhaps the Treasurer would like to suggest some available dates.

Also it was agreed that the website needs to be updated to what is a more dynamic site that reflects the level of activity within the various things we are doing.

Sean and Paul are presenting a Bristol Wireless workshop on behalf of Action Time Vision next weekend.

Bails is going into hospital on Saturday for his hip replacement operation, and expects to be there for a week, I’ll try and get visiting times posted here. Good Luck Rob 😀