I was recently brought on the board of the non-profit Partimus, which provides repurposed computers running free software (currently Ubuntu and related apps) to students and schools which need them. The organization currently has six deployments across the Bay Area.
Following a press release last month (Albert G. Stoll, Jr. | A Law Corp. partners with other businesses and Bay Area residents to support mission of Partimus) Partimus was contacted by ABC 7 San Francisco to see if we were interested in joining their “Voice Box” studio audience for an episode of 7 Live. Christian Einfeldt quickly accepted and sent out invites to several Bay Area Linux lists. Having never taken the opportunity to be part of a studio audience and excited about Partimus being mentioned on traditional media, I took the afternoon off on Monday the 13th and headed down to the TV studio to join everyone.
We arrived around 2PM and were let in to the studio at 2:15. From there we were briefed about the show and eventually walked into the studio.
The studio itself was split into separate sections, the stage itself, the “Voice Box” which is also on the stage, and the other studio audience section behind the (robot!) cameras.
The show is primarily pop culture, local news and light tech. In this clip you can see Sunshine Best (world traveler, chef, and she’s an Ubuntu user!), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) and Beth Lynn Eicher (of Ohio LinuxFest fame) talking about increasing bridge tolls and the differences in cultural stigmas for men and women attached to showing emotion in public.
But if you check out this video of the whole show and skip to 39:45 (it can be tricky to skip, I let it load first) you can hear the promo that host Brian Copeland gave us! Or you can just read my transcription here:
“As I mentioned earlier in our Voice Box today we have the non-profit organization Partimus. Now Partimus aims to help bridge the digital divide in public schools by bringing in Linux-powered computers to schools that otherwise would not be able to afford them.
**Cheers from the audience**
And you can help! This Wednesday December the 15th they’re having their first fundraiser “Share the Joy” from 5 to 6 at the Creative Arts Charter school in San Francsico. So for more information visit their website, Partimus.org.”
After the show we were able to talk to the hosts and explore the set a little.
Mark Terranova posted more photos here: http://zareason.posterous.com/pictures-of-partimusorg-friends-volunteers-ou
Several of us then headed up to the ZaReason up in Berkeley for a Partimus board meeting (and pizza!). The board meeting got a lot of organizational things taken care of and gave us the opportunity to tie up any loose ends before our fundraiser.
Wednesday night was our fundraiser! It was hosted at the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco and by fortune of a quick bus ride I was able to arrive a bit early to help set up. The attendees of the fundraiser ranged from those of us involved with Partimus itself, to teachers who were there to talk about how great Ubuntu has been in their classrooms to folks from the law firm to local business people interested in finding out more about the efforts of Partimus. It was a great event, I had a lot of interesting conversations about mainstream use of Linux, how I use it at my job, and particularly how we’re able to use it for deployments by Partimus.
Today we announced that our fundraiser had brought in $1,660! Thanks everyone!
Interested in helping out? Visit the Partimus donations page for ways to donate money or computers.
Partimus is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit in the United States, please request a donation receipt if you need it for a tax exemption.
Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011 at 9:06
Nice timeline of the event both here and at your Dreamwidth page.
Also saw Mark Terranova’s ZaReason writeup of the same.
And also the appropriate 2nd half of the 7Live video
Just how successful did you and the other participants and attendees feel the 7Live event actually went??
I saw that the seated attendees were certainly hootin’ and hollerin’ :)
—
On a somewhat-related note, Christian Einfeldt just recently posted a ‘Free Pizza! Triage Fest for Linux in schools’ for this Friday.
Just wondering if 7Live participants such as yourself, Mark Terranova and/or James Howard would be interested in Christian’s CACS “Triage Fest” as well??
Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011 at 9:27
As far as getting people to our fundraiser, I don’t think it was particularly successful. However, spending the time to get our name out there and to discuss the organization is often worthy of our time.
And yes, both James and I accompanied Christian to the triage fest on Friday. James is the server architect of the server CACS uses and we were working to upgrade the systems to 10.04, I wrote about it here: http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=3866
Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011 at 9:30
Correction:
The “Triage Fest” was this past Friday of the 31st.
Oops!!
Just saw your writeup of this at your blog and at your Dreamwidth page