Would A Youth-Run Computer Lab Last?

Dragon218 writes "Recently, I have been chosen to be part of a team of computer savvy youths who have been tasked to build and maintain a computer lab. We are probably going to get around $100,000 in grant money. The idea is to have it be a public lab, the trick being the users would help in commercial Web design or other projects to raise money to keep it active. I'd like a reality check on this. Also, if any of you have ideas to help this thing along, I (don't like to use the pronoun 'we' without the group's consent_ would appreciate it. If you would like more information about the group sponsoring it, you can check out http://brycchouse.org." Assuming the people in question know what they are doing, I don't see a problem with this at all, do you? Good luck, Dragon218.

Comments

Public access is the key

[Dwindlehop]

I was the systems manager for a large student organization last year (no link, the website's down *sigh*). Most of my headaches came from users, and the odd things they thought of to do to my computers in their spare time. And that was with a relatively restricted user base of about 50. If you have more users which change frequently over the space of a year, I think they'll be even more trouble.

I'd say the difficult thing is not getting teenagers to properly administer and staff a computer lab, but getting teenagers to be good users. Here is where your OS can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Maintaining a multi-user cluster of computers is much easier with a multi-user OS. Which one you pick depends on the knowledge and needs of your users, but I would highly suggest at least getting Windows NT, if not something beefier. Having a clearly defined policy on recreational use helps, too. Is web surfing okay? Would game-playing be tolerated? What about pornography (yes, it comes up!)? When users know what's expected of them, a large majority of them will try to fulfill those expectations.

Another thing which will make maintaining your computers easier is separating the duties of those involved. It sounds as if you in the sort of environment where everyone knows everyone else and they all get along. Trusting one guy to be completely in charge of purchases, for example, and another to handle installations means that your team won't be working at cross-purposes. Nothing is worse than having to spend hours of your time to fix someone else's 'fix'. Find some way of identifying what each person is responsible for and make certain they stick to it. The former because people get very unhappy when they perceive someone else is doing their job and the latter because people get very unhappy when they perceive they're doing someone else's job.

Jonathan David Pearce

Getting People to Do Things

[goliard]

So far all the comments have been about the technical side of things, which looks, from here, to be pretty cut-n-dried. The real issue is the human engineering one.

This project -- any volunteer project involving more than two people -- has serious People Issues. I speak from experience: I often organize hoardes of volunteers in my spare time, sometimes even to do pro work to raise money for our organization.

First, you're talking about getting users to contribute work. Since you're talking about selling these services, they'd better be pretty professional. You're talking some pretty heavy management burden here. Getting amateurs/volunteers to put out high quality work consistently can be hard, because volunteers take (all too often) the attitude "you should be grateful I did the work at all".

Second, you're going to have to convince people that it's worth while. Note that the OS movement is powered by the "scratch my itch" dynamo. Is it anyone's itch to make corporate web pages, to keep a public lab open? That strikes me as a very hard sell. You might get someone to do it once, but will they keep doing it?

Third, speaking as someone who does web production professionally, it's a bitch. Not the technical side -- the business side. The businesses are constantly coming back with piddling copy revisions, trying to get you to do free work ("it's just a little change"). And, BTW, my agency bills ~$50/hr for my time doing DHTML, and I am considered a jr. level DHTMLer. Boston. And I don't even do design, just implementation. Just in case you were planning on charging $20/hr.

Fourth, you're talking about drawing volunteers from the public. You don't even have any filters between you and them (such as all belong to the same club or some such). You're going to have a hell of a job making character judgements of the strangers that walk in your doors, and you're going to have to make hundreds of them, constantly. Not merely "Do I trust this person not to loose the next Morris worm from my machines?" but "Do I trust this person not to flake out in the middle of doing a customer's project?"

These are the areas in which *real* head-aches arise. Basically, you need to be -- or to have to hand -- a real "people person", or more properly a "leader of (wo)men" to bear the brunt of managing volutneers.

Is something like this possible? Sure: but it completely requires some highly charismatic person to marry their souls to this project. Someone who builds group esprit, who defuses conflicts, who has a natural air of authority, who personally exemplifies the values of the organization (e.g. brilliant hacker, hard worker, tolerant with newbie users, etc.), whom people trust and follow.

These people don't grow on trees. These people have their pick of volunteer organizations to work for, not to mention their pick of 80hr/week jobs. If you are or have such a person, then your organization is unspeakably lucky.

If you don't have such a person, and you aren't prepared to try to be that person, you are going to drink the dregs of a very bitter brew. Volunteers who manage volunteers often have the worst and the most embittering cases of disillusionment and burn-out. They rail about the stupid, lazy, and vicious nature of their fellow humans, and swear never to bother trying to help someone again. They feel taken-advantage of, rattled and hurt -- and unconfident of their own abilities.

Think about the human dimensions very seriously indeed.

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I'm going to suggest a radical idea here...

[rufo]

...and maybe suggest buying iMacs and a G4 Server running OS X Server. You can netboot the iMacs over a 100BT LAN, and each user would have his own space to do stuff in on the server (so you can use whatever Mac you want), as well as shared applications that everyone can have access to. Tech support will be much less of a headache because they're all exactly the same, you can administrate the boot HD once and have all the changes reflected on all the iMacs instantly... If you bought DV iMacs and some Firewire camcorders people could do DV editing on them pretty well, too.

Amount of Funding = $100,000
25 iMac DVs = $32,475
1 G3 Server running OS X Server = $6,000
5 DV Camcorders = $5,000
100BT Ethernet setup = $100-200

Total = $43,675

Don't know what else you need, but that looks pretty good to me. Don't need a *lot* of software, as each iMac comes with iMovie (DV editing), AppleWorks (works program) and PageMill (HTML editing software), along with some other software that I'm not familiar with. Of course, if you've never used Mac OS, or are somehow required to use Windows, then this won't work for you... Mac OS is pretty easy to learn though.

Anyway, was just an idea. Feel free to disregard if neccessary. :-)