Recently, American investors have started funding startups in 3rd world countries. It turns out that in Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Asia, there are a lot of artistic skills, without much local demand for the products. Well, Americans have both the funds and the desire to purchase these products. Some U.S. investors and charities have started providing funding for people in these 3rd world countries to start their own businesses based around these local arts. Among other things, the funding is used to obtain training, pay for raw materials, and start shipping the goods to the U.S. where they can be sold. Programs like this are helping to lift people in these countries out of poverty, and they are providing middle and upper class Americans with goods that are often of superior quality to factory produced products. The problem is that this does not do anything for our large numbers of people in poverty here in the U.S.
Helping starving people in 3rd world countries is a noble goal. Helping them in ways that reduce their dependence on us is even better. It cannot last though. We are not in any position to be giving people outside the U.S. significant amounts of our time and effort. Poverty is increasing in the U.S., and we have plenty of our own starving people that need our help. Our welfare system takes away some of the burden, but it adds others, partly because it is poorly designed. What we really need is not U.S. investors providing funds for startups in Africa. What we need is U.S. investors providing funding for U.S. poor. Most of these businesses that we are funding in 3rd world countries could exist in the U.S. as well.
Americans can make shoes and rugs and many of the other things that we currently import. Training is not that expensive, and it does not have to involve expensive trade schools. Things like knitting and weaving can be learned on the internet. Those with any level of artistic talent can learn how to make high quality costumes out of fairly cheap materials, and the current cosplay trend would help fetch some pretty good profits on this. Things like blacksmithing and metal casting are also easy to learn on the internet, and in most areas of the U.S. there are groups that would be willing to help with training for cheap or even free. This just brushes the surface. There is a market in fixing old toys. Learning to make simple web sites for individuals and small businesses is pretty easy. Many people with unusual talents have managed to make a decent income just recording and publishing YouTube videos of their performances. All of these things are artistic in nature, which means that they are not subject to the same sort of competition that normal jobs and products are. There are only two things most poor Americans are missing: time and training (and sometimes equipment and materials).
American investors and charities should be looking at the American poor, instead of, or in addition to, those living in 3rd world countries. They should offer funding, including enough for living expenses and training, for Americans who have or want skills in things that would provide the opportunity to start a small business based on artistic skills. Besides helping those in the U.S., this could also be quite profitable for investors. Demand for artistic products in the U.S. is fairly high, especially among the upper class. Art knives made by reasonably skilled blacksmiths can demand $10,000 a piece or more, for products that take about one month to produce. Hand crafted shoes can bring in a few hundred to a thousand dollars each for a week of work or less. An old doll that takes a few hours to clean, repair, and repaint can bring in $20 or $30 with a half decent job (more for an experienced artist). Hand knit or woven clothing and rugs can bring in a reasonable income as well. Many people have managed to make a decent supplemental income with YouTube videos, and good ones can bring in ad revenue for months or years after they are published, without any additional work. Even for those with less skill, these kinds of work can be done from home and supplement a poor income enough to make a significant difference.
What about those who are starving in 3rd world countries and do not even have food stamps to help them out? The more we help our own poor, the more resources we will have to help others. Every poor American we help out of poverty in a sustainable way is another potential donor, investor, or customer for poor people in other countries. Instead of looking at investing in Americans as a drain from funds that could be invested elsewhere, consider it an opportunity for a more sustainable investment model for everyone in need. Any investment that pays off will provide additional funding that can be used anywhere. In addition, investors might encourage Americans they help to invest in or donate money to organizations that help people in other countries. One rich person investing in some businesses in Africa will help a few people, until something happens that prevents that investor from continuing to invest (death or massive medical bills, for example). Several thousand middle class Americans donating money to charities that help people start businesses in Africa will ultimately provide far better funding and be far more resilient.
The best strategy here is probably a mentorship strategy. Investors should start investing in hobby-style artistic professions for poor Americans. They should provide paid or volunteer mentors for every person they fund. Those mentors should help beneficiaries manage their finances, find training, and setup their operations. The mentors can also report back to the investors, to allow them to bail as soon as possible when a beneficiary is not using the funds wisely. Another responsibility of a mentor should be to encourage beneficiaries to help out others once they are able to, and this theme should be repeated during regular meetings of the beneficiaries with the investors. With mentors, chances of success will be much higher, and imminent failure will be much easier to detect much earlier.
The long term effect of this will be to teach Americans that cannot find jobs to create their own. It will improve the U.S. economy, and it may even reduce the burden of the poor on the U.S. welfare system. More importantly though, it will provide Americans with the means to provide aid for others far better than we are currently capable of. A few rich investors helping the 3rd world poor start businesses to get them out of poverty cannot compete with what a robust U.S. economy composed of a large number of American middle class donors can do for them. A common religious theme applies here: You must help yourself before you can truly help others. To maximize the good we can do, we must first remove the mote from our own collective eye.
Showing posts with label training. Show all posts
Showing posts with label training. Show all posts
09 March 2015
31 March 2009
Conversion to Open Source Software: Training
If you are running a business and want to cut costs, one of the easiest and simplest things you can do is switch to open source software. Generally, this involves finding and downloading open source equivalents of any proprietary software you currently use, evaluating that software, and then installing the software and converting document formats to fit that software company wide. This may also require some amount of training employees to use the new software. That is what this article is about, the training.
Let's begin with OpenOffice.org, probably the most popular open source alternative to MS Office. The conversion here is simple. First let me ask a question: Has your company switched to MS Office 2007 yet? If you answered "yes", then training for OpenOffice.org is almost entirely unnecessary.
Earlier today, my mother was complaining about how much more difficult it is to use MS Office 2007 in comparison to earlier versions. People in your company probably make similar complaints, although maybe not in front of you. My solution was to install OpenOffice.org on her computer. No additional training was required, because OpenOffice.org is so similar to earlier versions of MS Office, that anyone who has just switched to MS Office 2007 will be completely willing to work out the few differences just to have something they already know how to use.
If that does not work, open Firefox to Google (I presume your company had the sense to switch to Firefox when the Department of Homeland Security declared MS Internet Explorer a security hazard) and search "OpenOffice.org tutorial". The first item in the results looks pretty good. If you do not like that one, the next few look pretty good as well. The point is that even if most of your employees do not want to read a tutorial, there are plenty out there and if you just have one employee read one or two of them, at least that employee can help out the others if they have issues.
If you are still skeptical, take a look at this link. How did I find this? Simple: I went to amazon.com and I entered "OpenOffice.org" into the search. That link was the first result. If you do not like that author, or how the book looks, there was a list with many other similar books. Even if you take the tutorial route one of these might be handy to have around for reference.
OpenOffice.org is a very popular piece of open source software and as such has a reasonable footprint. By this I mean that OpenOffice.org has managed to get enough attention for people to actually write and publish books detailing how to use it. This is not true of all open source software. One thing you need to learn before switching to open source software is how to find information about that software. In the previous paragraphs, I used two of the most effective methods for finding this information. If you need to learn anything on the internet, one of the most effective ways of finding teaching oriented information is using the keyword "tutorial" in a search. I searched "electronics tutorial" to begin learning basic electrical engineering. I have used "javascript tutorial" to learn javascript. This works with almost anything, but especially with software.
As you may have already figured out, the second most effective way of finding information online is by searching the subject you want to learn about, ie. "OpenOffice.org". In the above case, I wanted to find books related to the subject, so I went to one of the foremost online bookstores and searched. If you have tried it, you have seen the long list of relevant information. While these are probably the fastest and most effective way of finding information about using open source software, there are a few more which should be obvious, but are not always.
I think I am safe saying that all open source software projects have their own web page, in one form or another. Many smaller ones use repositories like sourceforge.net (write this down, this website has a very large number of open source projects, and a simple search will often leave you with many useful results), but each one still has its own pages on the web site. Bigger projects, like OpenOffice.org have full web sites all to themselves. OpenOffice.org's web page can be found at openoffice.org (big surprise?). As a matter of fact, let's go there right now. Notice on the left hand side (or maybe the middle of the page for you) there is a list of options? The top one and the third one down offer support of different types. Near the top of the page, there is a row of tabs; notice how the title of the fourth tab is "support". Click that. If you are familiar with internet forums, you might recognize the format of this page. This is a place where you can ask questions about OpenOffice.org, and people will answer them. The answers do not always appear overnight, but unless they are rediculous or unrelated to OpenOffice.org, they will probably be answered relativly quickly. If you are switching your business to OpenOffice.org and your staff is worried about learning to use it, show them that site. Make sure they know that answers often will not be immediate, but they will eventually come. Many open source software websites actually include tutorials made by the people who made the program. These websites can be invaluable sources of information and should probably be your first stop when looking for learning resources for open source software.
That should cover training for open source software. Try these techniques if you are hesitant about switching to open source software because of training issues. Another good idea is to download the software yourself and play around with it. Many open source applications are relatively self explanitory. I learned to use OpenOffice.org by using it. Your experience with proprietary software may also help you with open source software. I took a MS Office 2007 class and learned how to use OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet program more effectively, because a lot of the information applied directly to how OpenOffice.org operates. Remember though that not everyone learns like I do, or like you do. It is wise to supply your staff with reference materials, so they do not have to keep knocking on your door to ask how to do things that they were not able to figure out on their own.
In parting, I would like to offer some useful links:
Open Disc is a project that has compiled a CD of useful open source software for Windows.
Open Education Disc is a branch of the Open Disc project tailored towards students, especially college students, but contains some software that could be useful within selected business environments.
SourceForge.net was already mentioned in the article, but bears repeating. This website hosts web space for an enourmous number of open source projects. It is more frequently used by smaller projects, but it does host many larger projects as well.
Wikipedia.com has lists of open source software, if you look in the right places. An example is a search for "accounting software". At the bottom of the wikipedia page, in the 'references' section, there are lists of open source, freeware, and 'retail' (or, rather, proprietary) accounting applications. Similar searches for other types of software should yield similar results.
Searching "open source" or "open source software" on modern search engines will also get a long list of open source software sources. Just be careful. Upon searching "open source office" I discovered that there are web sites out there that try to exploit open source software by asking for personal information before allowing you to download it. Most good open source software is freely downloadable. Free as in no strings attached, so if you discover that the first site listed for the above search asks for your email address (and various other information) before it will allow you to download OpenOffice.org, note that it was a 'sponsered link' (ie, the web site payed Google to put it at the top), and note that the link under it, to OpenOffice.org is not a sponsered link and does not ask for anything before allowing you to download OpenOffice.org.
Lord Rybec
Let's begin with OpenOffice.org, probably the most popular open source alternative to MS Office. The conversion here is simple. First let me ask a question: Has your company switched to MS Office 2007 yet? If you answered "yes", then training for OpenOffice.org is almost entirely unnecessary.
Earlier today, my mother was complaining about how much more difficult it is to use MS Office 2007 in comparison to earlier versions. People in your company probably make similar complaints, although maybe not in front of you. My solution was to install OpenOffice.org on her computer. No additional training was required, because OpenOffice.org is so similar to earlier versions of MS Office, that anyone who has just switched to MS Office 2007 will be completely willing to work out the few differences just to have something they already know how to use.
If that does not work, open Firefox to Google (I presume your company had the sense to switch to Firefox when the Department of Homeland Security declared MS Internet Explorer a security hazard) and search "OpenOffice.org tutorial". The first item in the results looks pretty good. If you do not like that one, the next few look pretty good as well. The point is that even if most of your employees do not want to read a tutorial, there are plenty out there and if you just have one employee read one or two of them, at least that employee can help out the others if they have issues.
If you are still skeptical, take a look at this link. How did I find this? Simple: I went to amazon.com and I entered "OpenOffice.org" into the search. That link was the first result. If you do not like that author, or how the book looks, there was a list with many other similar books. Even if you take the tutorial route one of these might be handy to have around for reference.
OpenOffice.org is a very popular piece of open source software and as such has a reasonable footprint. By this I mean that OpenOffice.org has managed to get enough attention for people to actually write and publish books detailing how to use it. This is not true of all open source software. One thing you need to learn before switching to open source software is how to find information about that software. In the previous paragraphs, I used two of the most effective methods for finding this information. If you need to learn anything on the internet, one of the most effective ways of finding teaching oriented information is using the keyword "tutorial" in a search. I searched "electronics tutorial" to begin learning basic electrical engineering. I have used "javascript tutorial" to learn javascript. This works with almost anything, but especially with software.
As you may have already figured out, the second most effective way of finding information online is by searching the subject you want to learn about, ie. "OpenOffice.org". In the above case, I wanted to find books related to the subject, so I went to one of the foremost online bookstores and searched. If you have tried it, you have seen the long list of relevant information. While these are probably the fastest and most effective way of finding information about using open source software, there are a few more which should be obvious, but are not always.
I think I am safe saying that all open source software projects have their own web page, in one form or another. Many smaller ones use repositories like sourceforge.net (write this down, this website has a very large number of open source projects, and a simple search will often leave you with many useful results), but each one still has its own pages on the web site. Bigger projects, like OpenOffice.org have full web sites all to themselves. OpenOffice.org's web page can be found at openoffice.org (big surprise?). As a matter of fact, let's go there right now. Notice on the left hand side (or maybe the middle of the page for you) there is a list of options? The top one and the third one down offer support of different types. Near the top of the page, there is a row of tabs; notice how the title of the fourth tab is "support". Click that. If you are familiar with internet forums, you might recognize the format of this page. This is a place where you can ask questions about OpenOffice.org, and people will answer them. The answers do not always appear overnight, but unless they are rediculous or unrelated to OpenOffice.org, they will probably be answered relativly quickly. If you are switching your business to OpenOffice.org and your staff is worried about learning to use it, show them that site. Make sure they know that answers often will not be immediate, but they will eventually come. Many open source software websites actually include tutorials made by the people who made the program. These websites can be invaluable sources of information and should probably be your first stop when looking for learning resources for open source software.
That should cover training for open source software. Try these techniques if you are hesitant about switching to open source software because of training issues. Another good idea is to download the software yourself and play around with it. Many open source applications are relatively self explanitory. I learned to use OpenOffice.org by using it. Your experience with proprietary software may also help you with open source software. I took a MS Office 2007 class and learned how to use OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet program more effectively, because a lot of the information applied directly to how OpenOffice.org operates. Remember though that not everyone learns like I do, or like you do. It is wise to supply your staff with reference materials, so they do not have to keep knocking on your door to ask how to do things that they were not able to figure out on their own.
In parting, I would like to offer some useful links:
Open Disc is a project that has compiled a CD of useful open source software for Windows.
Open Education Disc is a branch of the Open Disc project tailored towards students, especially college students, but contains some software that could be useful within selected business environments.
SourceForge.net was already mentioned in the article, but bears repeating. This website hosts web space for an enourmous number of open source projects. It is more frequently used by smaller projects, but it does host many larger projects as well.
Wikipedia.com has lists of open source software, if you look in the right places. An example is a search for "accounting software". At the bottom of the wikipedia page, in the 'references' section, there are lists of open source, freeware, and 'retail' (or, rather, proprietary) accounting applications. Similar searches for other types of software should yield similar results.
Searching "open source" or "open source software" on modern search engines will also get a long list of open source software sources. Just be careful. Upon searching "open source office" I discovered that there are web sites out there that try to exploit open source software by asking for personal information before allowing you to download it. Most good open source software is freely downloadable. Free as in no strings attached, so if you discover that the first site listed for the above search asks for your email address (and various other information) before it will allow you to download OpenOffice.org, note that it was a 'sponsered link' (ie, the web site payed Google to put it at the top), and note that the link under it, to OpenOffice.org is not a sponsered link and does not ask for anything before allowing you to download OpenOffice.org.
Lord Rybec
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)