Contractor List

This is a piece of post-CollabTech futurology.

Let us embark immediately upon the creation of a skills database of available freegeek-friendly contractors. Let us direct the front desk, or preferably the NAP if it is consented by Council, to make appropriate use of this database in dealing with nonprofits. It will include the contractor's names, contact information, pricing information if available, and skills. For contractors to become part of the database, they must conform to the following requirements:


 * 1) They must prefer open source to proprietary software when there is no appreciable difference in featureset or quality (i.e. Firefox over IE, but not necessarily OpenOffice over MS Office)
 * 2) They must 1) teach classes at FreeGeek or 2) allow FreeGeek volunteers to shadow them in their work or 3) donate their special skills for 10 hours a week average per month to nonprofits.
 * 3) They must recommend responsible recycling of old hardware to all clients who replace hardware during their tenure, and are encouraged to recommend FreeGeek.
 * 4) They must consider using recycled hardware where appropriate.
 * 5) They must tithe 5-10% of profits from projects we refer to them.

Let us also create a list, for their use, of hardware that we could make specially available to these contractors for the use in their projects, either granted to the nonprofits at the end or sold at discount. Examples: network-ready printers, matched diskless terminals, routers/firewalls, matched keyboards, etc.

Jeff