I've only met a few of you but I thought this might be interesting for some group members. I was in Portland a few weeks ago where I happened to take a tour of a facility known as "Free Geek". They are a non-profit, community computer recycling center; people bring in their old computer hardware as a tax deductible donation, and volunteers take the computers apart, sort through everything, recycling what cannot be salvaged or is terribly out of date, and placing working parts into a build program through which kids and other community members can take classes, build 5 computers for charity, and keep the 6th themselves. They run a huge operation, and the nice thing is that their entire business is both "open source" in terms of the software they use for refurbished computers, and that every business process is transparently documented on their wiki, as they encourage people to copycat them. I think 7 or 8 Free Geeks have sprung up across North America already.
I was hoping that there might be a few people here who would consider discussing what would be involved for starting up a New York branch or similar operation. I don't think being "tech savvy" is necessary by any means. The amount of e-waste we generate and ship offshore is staggering, and I thought such an idea would be well received by the permaculture community. If anyone is interested in talking more about this please drop me a line!
For more info, here is their website, wiki, and a short video documenting the Chicago operation:
http://freegeek.org/
http://wiki.freegeek.org/
http://eads.blip.tv/file/1147809/
Best regards,
Jon
