[plug] #introducing and Installfests

[Harry McNally]

Late last year, Onno and I discussed ways to find out what subscribers might 
be seeking from membership of PLUG or subscribing to the PLUG mailing list. 
Onno had helped another NFP group by hosting a meeting that, after four hours 
of ideas, arrived at a direction that suited the whole group. We wondered if a 
special event like that might increase IRL participation at events and 
encourage paid membership to support those events.

To add to that Onno posted about his own experience with Linux and, while he 
got a few people figuring out when they started participating in PLUG, there 
wasn't a lot of feedback to match Onno's thoughtful consideration of how Linux 
has been part of his professional and technical life.

It takes time to articulate and, I wondered, what am I going to say other than 
that I use it every day (pretty much exclusively other than when I use Win10 
as a software wrapper around Altium Designer) ? So, apologies Onno, this post 
is a long time coming.

With the next Installfest less that a week away, I thought I'd explain why I 
asked the committee if I could run a series of Installfests this year. The 
journey begins in the last millennium.

I'd been using Linux for a few years by 1999 although I think the first system 
in the house was a firewall installed for us by Harry Protoolis around 1994.

In the late 90's the Coalition Federal government needed support from a 
Tasmanian senator for <some unrelated bill> and he predicated his vote on the 
introduction of a net censorship bill. Wikipedia is light on the machinations 
but EFA has some archive material:

https://efa.org.au/media-releases-archive/

There was a lot of campaigning by the EFA and the first (of not very many) 
political rally I attended was the Anti-Censorship Protest in Perth May 28, 1999.

See: https://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/may28/perth/index.html

My reason for taking part was a technical one; that the methods they were 
proposing would not work and it was easy to take that position because CSIRO 
were an authoritative source that were informing parliament in the same way.

The political reaction was savage. For anyone that remembers, the tactic taken 
was that anyone who opposed the Online Services Bill was a bomb maker, drug 
dealer, or child molester.

I wondered, outside of the astonishment and outrage, if more people were 
better informed about what the Internet offered, then the debate might be more 
rational.

That started what turned out to be 7 years of participation in Computer Angels 
in various roles and I am forever grateful for the participation of so many 
other technical supporters and non-technical volunteers for what was a free 
training and awareness organisation that supported that with a free 
re-furbished Linux computer.

But while there was a lot of support from all sides with time and knowledge, 
the thing we constantly struggled with was financial; a premises needed rent 
and disposal costs for "working glass monitors" that were found to have weeds 
growing through them meant we were constantly looking for operating funds.

That really wore us out and stopped us in 2007. Associations law required that 
we had to wind up in the black and boxes and boxes of IEC power cables became 
a skip full which went away for chipping to copper scrap. The copper price was 
at a peak and we got $2400 (I think) for the scrap which cleared our debts 
and, as required to wind up, we passed the remainder to "a like-minded 
association" which naturally was PLUG.

I've also learned that a past Benjamin (we have a few) donated all fees from 
one of his consulting contracts on to PLUG so these intermittent cash 
injections have helped PLUG continue to host events; albeit frugally.

Skip to late 2025 and this year and with Online Services (Age Restrictions) 
Bill and AI and I wondered if Installfests could encourage a new group of 
users to install Linux or become proficient with independent content using 
Hugo or a Mastodon server.

James has demonstrated the minimal cost required to host PLUG on Digital Lane 
and my own interest is still RaspberryPi hosting on a home network. Could PLUG 
share Ansible scripts or configured RPi images to download to offer 
alternatives to social media algorithms ?

So far public attendance at the Installfests has been mute but I have extended 
the promotion this time to see if we can reach people to simply install on a 
retired machine and give it a try. I see it as a Computer Angels flashmob; all 
the fun but at much lower cost.

So the event this Saturday is on the usual page. https://plug.org.au/installfest

Committee has added backup/restore as a theme and I have extended the RPi 
theme if anyone wants to bring ideas for home hosting servers or all other 
things Pi. If you let the list know if you are coming for an hour and what 
time then it is an opportunity to get like-minded project ideas at certain times.

If we get more public attendees then more hands will be helpful. If we don't, 
then we can hear your ideas and projects that you can bring. It would be great 
to see you and them.

All the best
Harry

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