[ubuntu-uk] Re: Functions of this list

[Matthew East]

On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 15:37 +0100, Norman Silverstone wrote:
> > Perhaps somebody needs to set the ball rolling in suggesting ways in
> > which we can promote Ubuntu in the UK? At present, my feeling on this
> > list (due to its very low traffic) is that we are more of a disparate
> > bunch of users at present, than having started to gel into a community
> > as such. I don't even know whereabouts most members are, or what their
> > interests in Ubuntu are, for example.
> 
> A lot of what you write makes good sense and, to start the ball rolling,
> I live in St David's in Pembrokeshire and use a desktop PC as a hobby
> for mail, news, some word processing and as part of my digital darkroom.
> I have a scanner and 2 printers, a laser and an ink jet. I also play
> games such as patience and help my grandchildren with their computing
> interests.

Introducing ourselves is a nice idea. I'm a trainee barrister living in
London. I use my thinkpad laptop for wordprocessing at work, email,
browsing the internet, and working on the Ubuntu projects I collaborate
on. I have an old desktop computer at home which I use as a home server
for email, website, and irc.

In the Ubuntu community I contribute to the documentation team helping
maintain some of the guides, and generally team-building. I'm also the
contact for (ironically) the Italian local community team, and am quite
active in the local community area and community side of Ubuntu
generally.

> > It strikes me that Ubuntu is the ideal Linux (if not even perhaps the 
> > ideal OS) to be recommending to the likes of charities, schools, and 
> > even to our Governments (in an attempt to wean them away from pouring 
> > our taxes down billg's throat and from lock-in to closed-format 
> > documents), and attempting to make moves in these directions may be a
> > way in which we find focus and achieve some success..
> 
> I agree and I thought that efforts were already being made in some of
> these. However, how do those such as myself help to promote the use of
> Ubuntu? 

This is an area in which most local teams (including the UK team) have
been very quiet, I think. This is bound to be at least partly because
it's quite difficult (short of having some contacts in institutions like
charities) to figure out how to make some productive headway on
promoting Ubuntu. If people have had experience with this, and share
this experience with the list, I'm sure that we can get some good ideas
for making some progress. I was emailed a while back by a guy who had
been asked by a charity to install Ubuntu on some PCs that had been
donated, but stupidly I have lost his email address. Maybe him and
others with similar experiences are subscribed to this list, and can
report on their involvements.

Matt
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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