Freedom Dreams

I have just got back from the first ADFA meeting. Things didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped. Surprisingly the head of sixth form seemed quite open to the idea, and when I mentioned free software, he asked if that was like Mozilla Firefox (yay, for firefox’s marketing). I was worried that he would have preconceptions due to something I did concerning the school website a few months ago.

However, I found that the place that I faced discrimination was with my peers. Fewer people turned up than I expected – only five – which would in itself be okay for a first meeting, but according to a friend, people are scared of joining the group, as they think it is somehow related to my creations of improper websites. It is not in the slightest!

How am I to overcome this prejudice? I wonder if I simply say tell them its not related, will I sound stupid and will they believe me? I think the fact that me and the IT technician have dual booted pcs without the knowledge of the teachers doesn’t help – people think we are up to no good with them. Maybe I should make a sign to say what they are, and what the importance is.

The meeting itself went reasonably well – five people were there, Joe, Andy, Matthew, Wallaa and myself. I briefly explained what digital freedom was about – although, I asked Wallaa if my explanations were good, and she said bluntly, No. In the same vein, I asked what people thought of the website and she said it had too much information on one page. I guess that is true – I have tried to stop it from getting too long, but obviously not enough – creating a short, snappy homepage would be a great place to start making the site more friendly.

One of the main things we talked about was the apathy problem – people don’t care about computers, or at worse try to get away from them. Apparently, apathy is a general problem, Wallaa is having trouble getting people to join the charity committee, so I think ADFA is getting double helpings. We really need to work out how to make it matter people; how to get people interested. Maybe the five debians pcs, plus a notice, are a good way to do it. Maybe I need to talk to more teachers about it, overcome the we-might-get-in-trouble-like-he-did-with-that-website prejudice by showing beyond doubt that ADFA is all allowed.

So, where do I take ADFA from here? Well I think that poster about the debian pcs is a good idea (one I only thought of whilst writing this blogpost), and tomorrow is Firefox Download Day – perhaps I can get a few people to try firefox and set a world record at the same time.