The Tuesday following Cyber Monday has been designated Giving Tuesday. Whether you observe charitable giving on that day or any other day of the year, the following are organizations I’ve worked with and/or given to that promote one of my own passions: putting Free/Open Source Software into schools and others in need.
I’ve been on the Board of Directors for Partimus for the past 5 years. In that time we’ve done projects in public charter schools, after school programs and a library. This year our focus has been work at a homeless shelter in San Francisco. See an interview with Elizabeth Pocock, our on site contact responsible for the oversight of the Partimus computer pilot project here.
This is also the non-profit that gets a donation from Boutique Academia for sales of the Ubuntu necklaces and earrings. So purchase a shiny gift for someone this holiday and help out Partimus too!
Partimus is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re also always looking for volunteers, so if you’re familiar with Ubuntu (or Linux in general) and are looking for a way to give back, please contact me at lyz@partimus.org. We’re especially looking for technical talent to help us organize and deliver on some of our technical goals, like creating custom ISOs for our schools and developing solutions to make it easier to deploy them and keep them updated (PXE boot servers, local proxies, etc). You can also hop on our tech-partimus mailing list and browse our archives if you’re interested.
Giving Tuesday post: On Giving Tuesday, help us give computers to low income shelters
Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Computer Reach not only does work in their region, but has deployed Ubuntu-based computers all over the world. This is the organization I went to Ghana with in 2012. Their counts page details the Linux and Mac computers provided to organizations worldwide.
Giving Tuesday post: #GivingTuesday
Based in Austin, Texas, I Reglue met founder Ken Starks several years ago at a conference and his work has always been an inspiration for Partimus. They recently completed a successful Indiegogo campaign to continue their work, but like all of our non-profits they can always use more funding to focus on their core efforts.
See sidebar on the main site to donate, they also accept hardware donations.
And Beyond
This is just a sampling of organizations doing this work. If you want to donate or work locally, I strongly encourage looking in your area for computer recycling programs using Linux, for both donation and volunteer opportunities.