Our Community Project:

The members of Open Source IT Solutions are currently running an IT Training center with The Lord's Abode (PTY) Ltd.

The center is run free of charge to the students and purely on a volunteer basis. It is aimed at the previously disadvantaged members of the community who have the abilty but no finance. Its main focus is on Computer Literacy and basic computing skills and typing but also offers the students more advanced courses in the fields of Programming, Networking, Databases and Web Design.

The Center is situated in berea near the Ponte building.

The Lord's Abode is a Section 21 non-profit company who has been in existance for over 25 Years. One of the many projects we are running is our IT training Centre. It is currently being run and managed by 'Open Source IT Solutions' who provide all the lecturing staff, course material etc free of charge. All the training in our centre is based on Open Source Software, namely GNU-Linux. This descision was made for various reasons which are: It is effecient, stable, cost-effective; It is growing in popularity in the work place around the globe; It lends itself to the type of training we are doing (Literacy, Office training to Programming & Web Design).

The project is made available free of financial charge to our students. Students must become involved in other aspects of the projects run by "The Lord's Abode"'(TLA) in order to qualify to become students. Our Students are all from a previously disadvantaged background as our aim is to uplift and enrich our community.

The students are provided with Quality machines (1000 Mhz PC's all networked) on which to train as well as quality study material developed by Open Source IT Solutions. Most of the notes and passed tests are also available electronically to our students.

Currently the school accomodates 28 students and is able to effeciently cope with 50 new students every 6 months. We are able to accomodate about 80 students con-currently at different levels of intensity and training.

Our lab houses 18 PCs, 14 of which are available to students during class, and they are all running RedHat GNU-Linux. We currently have over 14 courses on offer to students but our main focus is on literacy, Office Training and typing.

No person gains financially from involvement in the centre (Open Source IT Solutions volunteer their services and expertise free of charge). The Machines in the Centre were donated by members of Open Source IT Solutions.

The two lecturers are both well qualified IT personel with relevant experience. Terence van Zyl: Bsc. Information Tech. (RAU), BHons Information Tech. (RAU) Currently studying Masters in AI at RAU.

Andrew Gargan : Diploma in Structured Programming (Luso Zakheni) Currently studying for a Bsc. Information Techn. at UNISA

Both both have extensive industry experience as programmers and System Developers, 8 and 6 years respectivley.

We have applied to the GED for registration as a FET college and have only been able to obtain a pre-registration (We have been informed that "There is no formal procedure to register as an FET provider as yet.").

We are going to be making our application for accreditation of our facility with ISETT SETA as soon as we meet all the requirement and can aquire the neccessary funds. Members of the ISETT SETA have visited our premises and seemed impressed with what we are doing.

Our biggest obstacle in providing our students with the best has been beaurocratic. We have found government departments etc unwilling and unhelpfull to our cause.

We are looking for some outside help with this since unlike other organizations we don't have big money to throw at the problem although we have had some tremendous support from Open Source IT Solutions.

We are not looking specifically for money but rather for helping getting work for our students after they have finished studying with us and also with accreditation and formal recognition of our project and course material. As yet we have been informed that there are very few unit standards in place in the IT sector, espescially in the open-source/GNU-linux arena.