October 27th 2010

Yesterday’s meeting saw presentations about the history of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), Macbuntu, and (even more) on the Cycle of Change.

The History of FOSS John ran through the information he has been putting together about the history of FOSS for an audience of ‘third sector/charity workers/etc’. Intended ultimately as a handout to introduce an audience that may have no concept of the ideas, it presents a time-line of collaborative endeavour and the steps to establish the legitimacy of of the movement.

Macbuntu http://sourceforge.net/projects/macbuntu/ Martin introduced us to Macbuntu -  a Mac OS X Transformation Pack which can make your Ubuntu look like a Mac! It can also be used in other OS based on Debian/GTK. The package available from sourceforge includes all necessary system components to mimic Mac OS X appearance on Ubuntu Linux.

It does look like a Mac, but it doesn’t do anything to make it much easier to attach your iPod or iPhone, because of Apples enforced dependency on iTunes.

Cylce of Change (again!) David went on again about Prochaska and Diclemente’s Cycle of Change and how that applies to people making the behaviour change of moving to Linux from another operating system.

Crucially, the model allows you identify where people are in the process of change, allowing you to** tailor an appropriate intervention AND **plan/anticipate what help they may need during the next period/stage of change. David is thinking of writing this up, and is looking for help ideas on populating the ‘crib sheets’ for interventions at each stage.

Partly, he has been sparked to re-think the model, by the work of green h who are trying to provide low cost Linux machines with support. (The support targets the ‘action’ and ‘maintenance’ stages of the cycle, while promotion, sales, etc target the ‘pre-contemplation’, and ‘contemplation’ stages).

If you would like to help, a document has been started here: http://ur1.ca/278mm

Past Meetings