Am I Famous Now…

Life at the charity is slowly changing. I still want to leave tho, but manage it daily more and more to leave my mark.

Which mark? IT of course. When I first arrived there was hardly any computer usage at the charity, of course the office used one and in the common dining/living area there was one shared computer for all 20 companions. A shared computer mainly monopolized by a young guy chatting up birds on dating sites, but scared to meet with them. And downloading movies.

A former volunteer had set up a great system, a Windows 2003 server… for 4 computers. WTF? More even, the server wasn’t configured as file server, router or anything. The Windows 2003 serial was illegal.

For months now I have non-stop been fighting, always winning little battles. We had an online shop, which was soon forgotten. Ebay activities have, although still majorly wrongly used, taken an everyday part in the economical charity life. The common room now has 3 computers for the companions. 2 Companions have a private computer in their room.
The offices are well equiped. Every OS is legal nowadays. All together we have 16 computers now. All second-hand, according to the spirit of Emmaus.
As where before phone calls for donations/collections (the charity collects furniture to sell in the second hand store) were handwritten, since some weeks we use a computer for this. But this wasn’t enough for me. The small, and some months ago under-IT’ed charity, will soon store everything online. Yesterday I started setting up the whole collection procedure, with schedule, dockets and project collaboration, up online. Google Office and Basecamp being the future best friends of the charity. Now how’s that for a little local project, where homeless people can participate to the economical charity life and live?

Imagine that most of them has never sat at a computer, today they know every major free online dating site and in some weeks they will work daily with an online office sutie and project management system. More even, people living not that long ago on the streets and enjoying daily the cheapest bottles of cider, will be introduced to the world of CRM’s soon.

If I wouldn’t have lots of other planned projects, I would be proud of this evolution. Today I have no time for this. I still need to write a little manual for a companion, a brief manual to wordpress, hotlinking, tagging and FTP. Yes the first companion will soon start to blog.
Tomorrow I’ll start to configure a computer for sales/deliveries. I wonder how long it’ll take before the first one discovers the wireless network I set up. Hell yeah, I won’t look for a wire for my notebook (although almost every area has his hub now)!

Homeless people soon having a wireless internet access in their room.