[ale] Please help me give away PCs.

[Joe Knapka]

Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> > Would it be at all possible to give these machines away
> > to members of the home-schooling community? Or even
> > directly to public school *students*, who can take them
> > home and actually learn something from them?
> 
> Very likely, he can't.
> 
> Federal agencies can't arbitrarily "give" stuff away - not even scrap.
> There is supposed to be a process involved.  For the most part, the process
> is auction - the general public's primary means to obtain Government surplus
> and castoff stuff.  I have read where the Gov't is getting into the online
> auction biz, but for the most part, you would contact the agency's field
> offices' property/materiel mgt departments to find out about auctions.

But the original poster was specifically interested in giving
units to public school systems. So use the school system as a
middle man to get the stuff into students' hands.

One of your objections to giving old hardware to public schools
is that they won't have any way of actually putting them to a
reasonable educational use; and furthermore that having such a
hardware pool would make it difficult for the school to obtain
the budget to get the real hardware that they need.

If the school had a usage plan consisting of, "We will give these
units to students on a one-per-comer, first-come-first-served basis,"
that pretty much eliminates that objection. Sure some of
these kids will pick one up and take it home thinking they're gonna
play Quake IV on it, be disappointed, and they'll end up as doorstops.
But the more persistent ones, even if their original motivation is
just to kill off brain cells with video games, will figure out
a way to do that - put Linux or FreeDOS on 'em, and learn a lot in
the process. If the government is constrained to give the stuff to
a publically-funded organization, this seems like a good way to
do it. Obviously, the appropriate usage plan would have to be
suggested to the school administration.

I had a similar experience to yours. At age 10 I picked up my
dad's TI-59 programmable calculator, and within a month I was
making it do stuff he'd never imagined. But that
was a pretty limited piece of hardware. If I could have got
my hands on any kind of "real" computer it would have made
a huge difference to me. And I bet there are a lot of kids
out there in similar positions, especially on the low end
of the income scale.

-- Joe
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