[Cialug] Volunteer Opportunity for CIALUG: West Des Moines Teen Center

[kristau]

I have a contact at the City of West Des Moines who brought this
opportunity to my attention.  I asked him to draw up the following
summary for me.  Do we have enough interested parties within the group
to pull something like this off?  I know I would be interested in
participating in such a project.


The Scenario:

The West Des Moines Teen Center is located in a former elementary
school.  The Teen Center's equipment, tv's, games and furnishings have
all been provided through donations. In fact, the entire operation is
basically dependent on donations.

They recently received a donation of computers without operating
systems installed.  The cost of obtaining Microsoft licensed software
is prohibitive to the group so an Open Source alternative is being
suggested.

General Idea:

Would the local Linux community be interested in either designing  and
deploying or assisting with the designing and deploying of Linux and
Open Source based computer equipment for use in a local Teen Center.
Admittedly, the total scope and involvement of this project will need
to be talked out amongst the parties involved. Parties managing this
facility are in discussion at the moment and none of this information
should be considered to be the final decision or official direction of
their project.

The Hardware:

10 IBM 300PL workstations.
PIII 500 Mhz processor.
256MB RAM.
6GB hard drive.
Generic CD-ROM and Floppy drive.
Network card. Some computers have apparently had the onboard NIC fail
and have aftermarket cards installed. (Intel Pro 100 in one case)
Onboard sound card.
No Operating system.

The hardware is believed to be working, but will need to be tested
before use to confirm this.

The total number of workstations to be deployed has not been
determined at this time. (for example: some PCs may be held in reserve
for spare parts or as "hot-swap" workstations in the event of hardware
failures)

The Network:

There is an existing connection to the Internet.  Connection for PCs
would be made with the use of a 3COM hub (model not known, possibly a
12 port hub) connected to the School District network.

Network connection is maintained by the School District and would be
under their direct control.  Network will be subject to infrastructure
and policies of the school district. (For example: Internet filtering
for inappropriate websites, firewalls, web proxy, network topology
etc).

Miscellaneous:

The Teen Center would like to provide Internet browsing workstations
for the students. There may be a possibility that homework use may be
requested in the future. (ie, Something compatible with Microsoft
Office, ie Open Office).  Ability to utilize most of the technologies
in use at typical websites sites such as Java, Flash and streaming
media content.

The desktops will need to be sufficiently locked down to prevent teens
from circumnavigating any computer or network policies/settings,
installing additional software or services, etc, etc.  The usual
concerns of a secure network environment.

Software support for these workstations will be at a minimum so their
ability to resist tampering is very important. Teen Center staff will
not be expected to be able to troubleshoot computer
related issues beyond rebooting a system or replacing a system with a
"hot-swap" workstation if that is an option.

There may be some privacy issues that need to be addressed such as viewing
previous user Internet browsing history.  A kiosk style of
installation may be appropriate in this setting.

thanks,
kristau
-- 
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows

My GNUPG public key is available at http://www.kristau.net/public_key.asc