Group: LibrePlanet Ham

LibrePlanet Ham
Note	Ham Group
Region	Europe
Area	United Kingdom
Mailing list	broken
Website	http://wiki.richmondmakerlabs.uk/
Available language(s)	English
Contact	Amunizp
Members	0
Description	Libre Software and open hardware
Current status	Active

About us (me?)

Currently, in my free time, I work under a community interest company that help locals (and not so locals) with their tech. My aims is to promote only free software and open hardware. --amunizp (fsf#12735) 18:38, 23 August 2014 (EDT)

How to Join

Just show up and say hi. We are in South West london between Richmond upon Thames and Kingston upon Thames. Send me a message. User:Amunizp or you can also reach me on GnuSocial @andresinmp

Next events

We meet every Tuesday evenings. From 7.30 pm. details in Richmond MakerLabs Ask for Andres.

ICS file if you save this txt file as an ICS to put it on your calenders.

Previous events

Special event: Green Cinema at the Ham Library 30th of September featuring Karen Sandler's talk "Unchain my heart" with an introduction video from Stephen Fry. There might be a contrast video to aim for a discussion.

Day against Digital restrictions management (DRM) 2015

Join us on learning how to make ebooks from simple sintax text like markdown.

Document freedom Day 2015

We had 5 participants, we shared cake and pizza and had a great time discussing about free document formats, free software and that continued on to other subjects such as women in STEM and philosophy as an education subject. And then back again.

One of our local councillors was present showing her support to free document format.

Prior to the event flyers were set in my company, local shops and with the council. I also contacted my local councillors again and they gave me their support yet again Group:LibrePlanet_Ham#Talk_to_local_Councillors

Images can be found here: Richmond Makerlabs Blog

Coder Dojo

We had a coder dojo session in the Ham Youth Centre today. This coincided with Software freedom day.

Short note about Coder Dojo: normally focused for young people in this case between 8 to 14 years of age. It is to introduce them into coding. In this case there was some HTML, scratch and python.

I'll give an overview on my experiences:

In UK if you are going to do any type of volunteering with under age children even if the parents or teachers are present you need to get a Disclosure and barring service Check or DBS for short.
DBS normally cost money and it involves giving your details so that they can check your background. But if you plan to get the check for promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics you can do it via STEMNET for free. Software falls in at least two of those categories so cool.
STEMNET courses are very good to get some idea as to how to behave and inspire students (and by extension teachers and parents).
Today was chaos. Seems that this is what it is supposed to be. We attempted to divide in groups. Some wanted to do Python, others scratch and others HTML. Some had their laptops and others did not. WIFI was available but not trustworthy. We had a USB going round with installers and some documentation for windows machines and mac machines. I loaned my netbook with trisquel installed to do some python.
Had stickers provided by the fsf and some bulletins set on the reception. I am sure some where taken. I also had some Linux Voice magazines.
As per the activities themselves it was only 2 hours with a 15 min of breaktime (which may of us excited types did not take). I was on the python area.
All I needed to know for today was
- print ("Hello world")
- print ("Hello world", 5+2)
- Some idea as to how while loops are supposed to work.
- It was recommended to me to think out loud how things work and just ask them to run scripts with only slight modifications until we get it right. This actually saved time: if I had internet I would be double distracted when searching.
- That is it. The rest was on pdf that was given with executables and some books and printouts available in the table.
I am in two minds about having parents involved or not. Since parents were there with some of the children there was little interaction between the children. But some parents were really helpful with their children and was really cool.
Not having internet readily available made it better. Less distraction. Sorry for the dead tree material but still works.
There where some arduino and rasberry pi demonstrations.
One of the beginning Python books went missing (sorry!) one of my Linux Voice magazines is also missing. Not too bothered about that one: hopefully it went to a good home!
Over all great experience that will be repeated every month. Hopefully I will be able to help some more later on.

Talk to local Councillors

Since the news of ODF, pdf, html and csv being the official format I arranged to talk to my local councillors from my local ward Ham, Petersham and Richmond Riverside. Also a work colleague is also a councillor from another ward. I talked to them about free software and how this is a good opportunity to leave proprietary solutions behind. They found it very informative and said that they would install firefox and libreoffice. Also they had heard from their local civil servants that Kingston upon Thames and Richmond upon thames where looking to unify their services and that Kingston upon thames was going to non propietary solutions.

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