Ithaca Middletown Freeville

Ithaca Free Software Association: http://ithacafreesoftware.org

• Mailing list
• Member content publishing

• Participate in Software Freedom Day by hosting an event on the Ithaca Commons (public square)

• Participate in Ithaca College's Educational Technology Day (Public School teacher training day)

• Maintain a Free Software computer lab in the Greater Ithaca Activites Center (a local community center)

• Host and support local installfests (Downtown, Cornell, Tompkins Cortland Community College)

• "Tabling" in a local grocery co-op. Passing out CDs

• Listing of our local representatives in local, state and Federal govt. Provide skeleton letters to be customized by the members, signed, and mailed to reps.

• Order Free Software CDs and place them in local businesses, along with a one-page information sheet about IFSA

• Contact administrators in local school districts to talk about the advantages of Free Software in education. The Ithaca City School District IT manager recently told our group that he has hired the first GNU/Linux system administator.

The suggestions provided and events depicted above are the fruitful results of the robust and vigorous free software user and developer community in Ithaca, NY.

For now, there is no analogous community in Middletown, NY. My task is to start growing one. One small habit that I do have that helps introduce people to free software is that I always carry some live cdrom GNU\Linux distributions with me. Two separate area coffee bars now feature free software running from these disks for their internet kiosks as both proprietors were weary of many malware mishaps.