Fossbox has just been awared an A4A grant to set up a portable Ubuntu training suite and offer 4 free taster training sessions. Contact us if you’d like to host a session or would like more information. Visit our website to find out more about Fossbox training sessions.

We’d like to know more about what sort of training non-profits need, so do visit our training poll and cast your vote.

We’ll be posting details of individual training sessions here over the next few weeks.

Social Media Training at the Evelyn Oldfield Unit, 356 Holloway Road
London N7 6PA

Introduction to social media for BAMER organisations demonstrating popular platforms with help to assess whether it’s right for you, get started, avoid the more obvious risks, build and evaluate your social networking.

An election debate including issues which are otherwise left out of the mainstream debate such as poverty alleviation, bank regulation, curbs on secret lobbying, defending the BBC services against media industry pressure to cut public broadcasting, care for the elderly, climate and nuclear weapons.

You can vote for which topics will be included on the 38 Degrees election debate page.

Charter for citizens’ and artists rights in the digital age has just been released by a coalition of organisations in 20 countries. Video and text summary here.

This is particularly timely for the UK after the passing of the Digital Economy Bill through the Commons last week. More information about the Digital Economy Bill here and the 38 Degrees campaign to ban secret lobbying here and more about the Free Culture Movement here.

Dan Martin has started up a list of things you can do with Linux that you can’t do on Windows. Being able to add and reconfigure software and hardware without having to reboot is one of my favourites. I’d add some Ubuntu-specific advantages to my list:

• Completed installation in 20 mins to half an hour – rarely need additional drivers and, if I do, Ubuntu pops up a little green gizmo that tells me what it is, warns me about any implications, and offers to install it for me
• Plug and play really means you can plug in anything from a printer to a camera to an mp3 player and Ubuntu thinks for about 5 secs before informing me it’s ready to use. Again, no CDs, faffing, rebooting etc

It’d be good to expand this list — too many people think of Linux as a poor substitute when, in reality, it’s better in many ways and at least just as good.

I never know whether to roll about on the floor laughing at these idiots or be very, very afraid. These are the latest rantings of the entertainment and software industry on intellectual property in which they argue that countries which support open source at governmental level should be put on a ‘watch list’.

Perhaps we should be very afraid in light of a new law being shooshed through Parliament on the down-low, once again, of the entertainment industry, which would not only force ISPs to spy on users and pass information on their internet use to ‘copyright holders’ but also suspend broadband access for infringement by anyone using that connection (so that libraries, internet cafes etc will find it difficult to operate) and also block sites which champion freedom of information such as Wikileaks. And, if the entertainment industry gets its way, this would include Free and Open Source Software.

Find out more and support the campaign for internet freedom at 38 Degrees.

I get asked this all the time, so here’s a quick reference. You change styles in Wordpress templates either by editing the CSS stylesheets for a template or the PHP templates themselves.

Before messing with a theme, you should create a ‘child’ theme — otherwise your changes may get overwritten next time you upgrade your installation. There’s a simple guide to creating child themes here and check the Wordpress Codex for more thorough installation guides.

If you’re not sure what you’re doing, it’s probably a good idea to start with a stock template and fiddle with its CSS. You can do this through the Appearance -> Themes -> and -> Edit function in Wordpress itself or edit the files on your desktop and then upload them. Better still, put a ‘test’ installation on your own computer and upload the whole ‘child theme’ when you’ve finished, then you won’t wreck your ‘real’ site — or display your mistakes to the public!

Click here for instructions on installing LAMP on an existing Ubuntu installation and follow the longer instructions for installing Wordpress here

As you get more confident, you can get more ambitious and – yes – it’s often easier to blend in bits of existing code but you really will need at least some understanding of CSS to get started. If you’ve never used CSS before, W3 Schools CSS Tutorial will get you started.

There’s a discussion of whether older people find ICT skills more difficult to acquire than younger people on a VCS research network I belong to. But I’m not sure it’s a skills issue as ‘older’ people are very well represented on social networking sites and can usually easily learn the skills.

The issue is motivation — for example I do think there’s a cultural difference in the way 20-somethings organise their social ‘reality’ around social networking and mobile phones. Patterns of socialising change over time (well, for most of us), which isn’t new. I’ve noticed that arrangements to meet 20-somethings usually involve a sort of ‘triangulation’ exercise where I’m updated every hour or so on their shifting trajectory and ETA and I have a real sense of a swarm of nodes constantly reorganising their temporal-spatial links on the other end of my moby. A youthful relative once asked me how on earth we managed to make social arrangements without mobile phones. I explained that we used to make an arrangement in advance and stick to it. Wow, she breathed – how inconvenient!

‘Always on’ just isn’t part of many people’s ‘reality’, however, and so they are not going to pick up and constantly update their ICT skills in the same way. However, if there’s an application people find meaningful, they will pick up the necessary skills. For example, a fifty-something acquaintance did about 20 ICT training courses, none of which stuck. She was convinced that she was ‘useless’ at technology and just didn’t need email etc. But when sent a bunch of Flickr photos of a new baby in the family she suddenly decided to buy a computer and started enthusiastically teaching herself to use photo apps. For my 70-something father it was Skype with video when my brother was living abroad – and being able to print out the service order and hymns attractively for the church where he’s sexton. He nevertheless has a firm resistance to learning to do nything else ICT-wise and eschews social neworking with loathing.

Professionals, governments and educators get hung up on ’skills’ but, I think, the fact is that if people want to use computers for something that matters to them, they’ll pick up the skills. It’s mostly an appropriate design problem rather than a skills problem.

People’s Supermarket looks like an interesting project and it reminds me of the food co-ops of the 70s. Apparently not open for another 10 weeks but I’m looking forward to shopping there.

I was very touched by Sarah’s post for Ada Lovelace day in which Fossbox got a mention. I also have very fond memories of PRADSA — I really miss this regular opportunity to discuss technology in a wider framework of social action.

Weren’t we going to organise a women’s event to keep the energy going? It’s got lost among the bustle of setting up Fossbox as an independent organisation and perhaps we should revisit this?