A suggestion that might be appropriate in Montreal: Dans La Rue ( <a href="http://www.danslarue.com/en">http://www.danslarue.com/en</a> ), which provides services to at-risk youth. They've got a nice history of teaching things like software/design competencies. -ginger <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Gregory Pittman <<a href="mailto:gpittman@iglou.com">gpittman@iglou.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> This rather cheesy subject line is my lead-in to an idea that came up in my head earlier today. There may be insufficient time to implement this in Montreal, but the idea is that, rather than just being a bunch of geeks that breeze in and breeze out of town, leaving money in our wake, we might find a way each year to connect to the community where LGM takes place. Is there some volunteer task we might do one evening while at LGM that makes some kind of connection with the host city and its community? A simple one might be helping out in some setting such as a place for the homeless. A less simple one might be some volunteer effort that in some way connects to the expertise of attendees in computers, technology, graphics. What does this do for us? An important question. For attendees it offers a way to at least briefly immerse ourselves in some aspect of the environment where LGM takes place, makes us a bit less "outlandish" both from our perspective and those in the host city. It offers some notoriety, something that sets LGM apart from other tech-oriented conferences. We might find ways to participate in some fund-raising as a means to simply hand over some amount of money to some group, but I think that personal involvement says a lot more than the dollars would, and even those who cannot contribute money can give their time. It wouldn't hurt for other open source conferences to follow our lead. So I'd like to see if this resonates with anyone else. Greg _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list <a href="mailto:CREATE@lists.freedesktop.org" target="_blank">CREATE@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create" target="_blank">http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create</a> </blockquote></div> -- ginger "all-lower-case" coons <a href="http://adaptstudio.ca" target="_blank">adaptstudio.ca</a> 647.865.7757 (Toronto) 514.213.1318 (Montreal)