ubuntu-ngo team mailing list archive

[Laura Czajkowski <laura@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Aloha folks, I got this email and thought you all might be interested in
this as this is ideally what I hope to use the interviews to show other
NGOs that they can do it and how to.  I've asked Anna also to join us in
the channel #ubuntu-ngo if she has any questions and to meet people



Laura,

My friend Pen gave me your contact info and said that you might be a
useful person to talk to about implementing open-source software at my work.

I'm spending one year working for a tiny little non-profit in Washington
DC called Different Avenues, which does outreach and health promotion
for young Black and Latina women who are involved in sex work. (I'd tell
you to look at our web site, except it's horribly out of date.) My
supervisor is interested in converting all the office's computers to
using entirely open source software, and she's placed me in charge of
weighing the pros and cons of various software options, and ultimately
installing software on all the office computers.

I have a reasonable amount of computer knowledge for a lay person--I run
Ubuntu on my own computer. However, I'm no expert, and a lot of the
discussions I'm seeing online about the pluses and minuses of various
open-source equivalents of Microsoft products are totally over my head.

So I ask you--do you know of any resources, either web sites or people I
could talk to, that go through various open source projects and lay out
their pluses and minuses in ways that a person who's not deeply involved
in the open-source community could understand? (I'm thinking of both
myself, with some open source experience but no formal computer science
background, and my supervisor, who's proficient in a number of Microsoft
programs but knows almost nothing about open source software, other than
the fact that it's free and fits with her political views.)

If it helps, the Microsoft programs we're looking to replace are Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath, Access, OneNote, Publisher, and Adobe
Reader. I know that many of these can be replaced with OpenOffice
software, which I know from experience is pretty reliable...but how do I
assess the potential replacement options for the ones that don't have an
OpenOffice equivalent?

Also relevant; I want to install as much open source software as I can,
but I don't want to convert all the computers to Linux. We're a very
small office with no real tech person, and I don't trust my own limited
Ubuntu skills to help if anything goes wrong.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Anna

-- 

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/czajkowski
http://www.lczajkowski.com

Skype: lauraczajkowski
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