[CS-FSLUG] Linux classes and website

[Tim Young]

(grin) This is an awesome idea.  I may be able to help in part also...

I am with LightSys Technology Services (www.lightsys.org), and we do a fair bit
of teaching Linux for mission organizations.  We have one workshop in basic
Linux installation that deals with all the main packages that are needed for a
small office deployment.  We have another workshop, Linux security, which
covers all the security ramifications of a small organization that has people
working in "creative access countries."

I am just about to teach the Linux Security class online to a few missionary
home-office technologists.

N-ten, techsoup, and a few others have some pretty good material for
non-profits and Linux.  My Internet is flakey right now or I would look up
specific URLs, but techsoup.org is a good place to start tracking them down. 
BUT they do not cater to Christian work, just nonprofits of any sort.  This can
be a problem because many of our workshops require folks to work together
building VPNs and things like that.  If you cannot trust the other person at
the other end of your VPN, you do not want to build one.  So it is important to
have some Christian materials out there, and have Christian workshops.

If you make this site, I would like to encourage you to not only make
white-papers, but to also find creative ways to teach this great material to
those who need it.  There are tons of free tools out there that make it
possible to teach on-line without a lot of problems.  But also you would be
amazed at the number of Christian non-profits in your area that could benefit
from you teaching this to them.  If a few of you borrowed a church's
bible-study room and gathered all the non-profit IT folks in your immediate
area, you could make an awesome difference for them!

	- Tim

Doug Coats wrote:
> 
> So here is my thought:
> 
> We could start a website that mirrored the classes that we teach with the
> lessons so that the students could visit and revisit the concepts and
> configurations as needed.
(snip)
> We could all share our knowledge and experiences and learn new things in the
> process.
> 
> I figure we could use something like Drupal as our CMS and even give whoever
> uses the site the ability to comment and add content if we wanted to.
> 
> What do you think?  Anyone interested?
> 
> Doug Coats