Darragh, the goals of blind-sysadmins and IAVIT aren't that different. Just take a few moments to look at the IAVIT mission statement at http://www.iavit.org/about.php. Here's one of the bullets: Employer Outreach IAVIT seeks to help potential employers see that blind and visually impaired technologists can be effective, resourceful and independent additions to their work force. The very fine distinction you are making between the goals of blind-sysadmins and IAVIT is counter productive. It's way, way more important for us to work together. Fractionalizing our efforts only makes it less likely that any of us will succeed. Do you intend to discourage blind programmers from working with you? What if some programmer with a lot of energy came to you and offered to take over your site? Would you say no? What if he said he'd take over the site but he doesn't really do much systems administration and he'd like to put up a lot of programming resources? Would you tell him to go away? You can't let little things like that get in the way of working together. In fact, it doesn't even make sense to say that your goas idffer from those of IAVIT because you have as much right to set IAVIT's goals as anybody. You probably understand this. I am guessing you don't consider yourself the King of blind-sysadms.com. You'd like all of us to contribute, right? You'd like that to be a community effort, right? Well, just as much with IAVIT. I think I can speak for the entire Board of Directors by saying that if you came to us and said you think IAVIT should put more emphasis on highlighting the effectiveness of blind systems administrators, we would be all for it. Personally, I'd be willing to dump IAVIT in favor of blind-sysadmins if it was practical. But I'm not the only person involved. And there's a considerable infrastructure behind IAVIT at this point. All you have to do, Darragh, is say, "Here's what I need." I can't guarantee that I can make it happen but the point is that IAVIT exists for *YOU*. We have a member who is working on getting a grant form the Open Software Foundation. Who knows if he'll get it. But we can take donations from the OSF. We already have that infrastructure in place. On 04/05/2013 02:56 AM, Darragh OHeiligh wrote:
Hey John,
Funnily enough, when I was writing that mail I had a suspician that you were going to write something like that.
My origional thought's for the blind sys admin website were actually completely separate to this list. I completely forgot the title of the list at the time but when I realised my mistake I tried to make sure I wasn't standing on anyones tows by enlisting contributions from this user base.
My origional plan was to highlight the effectiveness and efficiencies of blind system administrators. Iavit has a very different focus that may in many respects be more beneficial and a lot more difficult to achieve.
That's how I see it anyway.
I'm already involved with enough committees. I don't need the headache of another one. That's why I've asked for contributions and / or people to co-manage the website. I had hoped that if people got involved, perspective employers would see that there's a helpful community of blind system administrators ready and able to support each other. By having a visible community of blind system administrators companies would inadvertantly see that there is a requirement to make applications and systems more accessible.
Regards
Darragh Ó Héiligh Fujitsu
Offices of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Fredrick Building, South Fredrick Street, Dublin2 Telephone: +353 (1) 618 3559 Email: darragh.oheiligh@oireachtas.ie Internet: http://www.oireachtas.ie
From: "John G. Heim" <jheim@math.wisc.edu> To: Blind sysadmins list <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org>, Date: 04/04/2013 17:03 Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] BlindSysAdmins website. Sent by: "Blind-sysadmins" <blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org>
Do you people have something against www.iavit.org?
I mean, I just don't get this. Is it the name? Well, maybe that name is crummy. Who knows? But the name was settled upon by the people who got together, some of whom are on this list, to create the group. We chose the term visually impaired over the word blind because we wanted to be inclusive of partially sighted people. And we chose the word technologists over sys admins to include programmers and the like. I guess that's what happens when a committee choses a name. But does it really matter that much? People seldom type in a URL. They find a site by googling it or clicking on a link.
But www.iavit.org is hosted on a ubuntu server virtual machine donated by a web hosting company. And it is owned by a non-profit so it's not dependent upon any single person. Instead of going off on your own, why not combine forces with www.iavit.org?
Darragh, what about wordpress? I'm not a fan of any kind of windows hosting, on so many levels & for so many reasons. But I'd be happy to help get a site going w/wp, since that's kind of my area of specialization. I know the spam & security plugins, & I just generally know my way around that cms in general. So let me know what u think?
On 4/4/13, Darragh OHeiligh <Darragh.OHeiligh@oireachtas.ie> wrote:
Sorry folks but I've got completely p'd off with Drupal 7 and with
On 04/04/2013 10:43 AM, Jackie McBride wrote: trying
to make the anti-spam work properly I managed to break the damn thing.
I'm going to try to get this back up and running so if anyone wants to help out your more than welcome. In fact, if you want to take over the project, consider the web space yours to do with what you wish. There's plenty of disk space and bandwidth to use for the BlindSysAdmins website so by all means. I'd like this to be a community driven site so having one person manage it really isn't what I'm hoping for.
I'd love to do something from the ground up using either PHP or .net. I'm kind of liking .net at the moment. Would anyone be interested in doing this with me?
Go on. It's a blank slate at the moment. Do with it what you want.
Darragh
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