The Center for World IT Education

Re: Set up collaboration Wiki

2006-10-26T01:46:00.000-07:00

Today I finished setting up a wiki for CWITE and IRC Seattle to collaborate on educational content on.

We are working on creating an educational curriculum, and end-user documentation for the applications installed, on the computers we set up at the SeaTac computer lab.

There are a few people involved in this project, and since I dont have pictures of all of them yet, I'll delay introductions for now. We are expecting to have an administrative meeting with IRC in the next week, to meet their new Resource Developer, so more details will be posted then!

InterConnection

2006-10-10T11:51:00.000-07:00

Interconnection tour today.

Later today we are going to take a tour of the InterConnection.Org facilities. Interconnection is a hardware recycler, and provides discount, used hardware to nonprofits and also to the wholesale market.

CWITE.ORG is considering a partnership with InterConnection, to emulate their services abroad. (Thailand in particular) Interconnection is already working on partnerships with The Camino Foundation (Another NGO that CWITE supports, but more on that later) so this is a great chance for CWITE to join in, offer financial and intelectual support, and get first-hand experience in what it takes to set up a foreign subsidiary.

Need a $100 computer? It's already here.

InterConnection is our primary supplier of PC's. For $110 we receive the following:

P3 1ghz (or higher)
17" Monitor
Keyboard/Mouse
Network Card
Windows 2000

I know there is a lot of sensation about the MIT OLPC initiative, which if it succeeds, is a great advancement towards bridging the digital divide. However, we already have access to more powerful computers, cheaper.

Making ourselves known

2006-10-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

Marketing efforts
As we are beginning our marketing efforts, I am busy revamping the CWITE web infrastructure. Part of this is to create a blog where the volunteers can publish information about what we are working on.

Website
Our new website is a mixture of technologies.

Microsoft Expression Web Designer (MEWD)
The basic site (viewable at www.cwite.org) was created with Microsoft Expression Web Designer (MEWD). MEWD is a huge step above Frontpage, which is it's obvious replacement (makes me wonder why Frontpage is going to roll out with Office 2007) . The biggest benifit is that MEWD is very static-html friendly. I was able to slap the content together, then just FTP the project to my webserver, and everything just worked (pages, site navigation menus, etc)

How great is that?

Google hosting
Another great tool we are leveraging is Google's hosting services, which comprises of:

Domain Hosted Email
Domain Hosted web pages
Calendar
Blog (this blog)
Groups

Other tech
Other technologies we are leveraging include a Windows 2003 server running MediaWiki. Unfortunatly for us, MediaWiki requires Apache and MySQL, so we have to use that instead of E-Z IIS.

Fortunatly for that, we can use the same server and services for a subversion repository, where we store our version-controlled documents.