[Cadre-politics] status: matching funds

[Dan MacNeil]

MATCHING FUNDS
READERS RESPOND (north shore)
READERS RESPOND (software)
TATTOOS
BUSINESS PLAN

MATCHING FUNDS

Please donate here:

	http://thecsl.org/go/donate

We've (almost certainly) got matching funds from the career 
center to pay half of Mike's wage for the year.

We have $600 in pledges and $19.20 in cash.

We have $3600 of the $5800 we need.

We need $2200 more by the end of September.

Mike is smart and hard working. He proves authority wrong.

He can take a shot.

At 15 years old, Mike is not likely to find better work than us 
for some time.

Many problems are complicated and require messy compromise to
fix.  Maybe the head of the red cross needed $565,000 to to do 
her job this year:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/08/AR2008040801553.html

...maybe not.

Raising this money for Mike is neither complicated nor messy. 
Here there is no overhead, no exaggeration, no omission, no 
compromise.

In the past 5 years, we've taken advantage of a few guys in
Mike's situation.

One guy works  at market rate in Silicon Valley. Another guy
did a tour in Afghanistan and is in the middle of a second tour
in Iraq. Another guy went to cs.UML.edu for a semester and
dropped out to work installing burgler alarms.

As an organization we train people up, build some momentum and
then run out of money or exhaust people's willingness to work for 
free. Then we start again.

Some of us are to the manor born. Some of us are born with fewer 
opportunities. Worse, there is a shortage of talent and a surplus 
of potential talent.

We are not called to success but to faith. I've got the faith,
this is one of the times I'd like some success.

Please donate here:

	http://thecsl.org/go/donate


READERS RESPOND (north shore)

Based on last week's status report Chris S, connected us to the
Northshore WIB. (Work Force Investment Board) Apparently our 
friends at http://nscap.org are not the only ones wanting 
something like http://mvhub. It is looking really good, 
especially on the limiting nepotism front.

Laura's boss doesn't favor inept employees. The leading Peabody 
peace and justice committee independently endorsed our efforts. 
However the fact remains that I'm married to the deputy director 
of NSCAP.  This 3rd connection to the north shore is a great 
reduction in nepotism guilt all around.

Thanks (yet again) to Chris S.

READERS RESPOND (software)

An alert reader noted that SVK is pretty nice. He particularly 
likes the ability to work offine and push changes to the 
repository later. He's not alone in his like:

http://blog.brautaset.org/2005/05/15/ditching-gnu-arch-aka-embracing-svk/ 


I'm still inclined to see how bzr works out. The rest of 
https://launchpad.net/+tour/index is pretty nice and bzr 
integrates with launchpad.

I'm still struggling to decide if my lack of grok:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

...for the the whole distributed, 3rd generation version control 
thing is because it is mostly hype or if it is because it is a 
concept you can't understand without experiencing it.

When I was at habitat, I had a long conversation with a quite 
smart senior manager about why we wanted to setup email. He 
couldn't understand how email was different from hard copy 
memorandums via inter-office snail mail.

Some years ago, when I was at LTC, I struggled to persuade 
various now gone management types that "intra-net" wasn't "magic" 
and that installing microsoft intra-net software wasn't going to 
magically build a database or make people like each other.

I'm betting 3rd generation, distributed version control software 
is probably closer to email than intra-nets as a plug and play 
useful thing.

TATTOOS
While we (the royal we):

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we

... are thanking Chris S, I should mention
the tattoos.

It is a goal of ours to get http://mvhub.com used by more than 
social workers.

Thanks to Chris, we have about 9,500 temporary tattoos and about 
9,900 remaining refrigerator magnets.

Genius, sheer genius.

At the folk festival. we (Mike F, David S & I) had people lined
up 3 deep at times to get themselves made into human advertising

We're going to be doing more tattooing at the Lawrence Library 
and at a Lowell middle school parent's night.

Of all the tabling / leafleting I've done in my life, this has 
been the easiest, the most pleasant and perhaps the most effective.

BUSINESS PLAN

The core assumptions of the current plan is that trying works 
better than not trying.

We plan:
	1) Formal partnerships with local partners.
	2) We plan to ask businesses for money

This money will buy a a living wage for CSL programmers and the 
cover marketing and networking expenses of our local partners.

The latest scrap of a plan is at:

http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2008-August/000673.html

Coming soon is a meeting with Jericho Road and a potential free 
consultant.

Obviously, it would be useful to know if businesses are willing 
to sponsor mvhub. The most important part of the planning process 
will be testing this assumption of generosity on a small scale.