Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
During the first COVID confinement, my son was in high school. Like everybody else, the students and teachers had to start “teleworking” however they could! The school had gotten the loan of some computers for the students in our county, but, unfortunately, not enough for everybody who needed one. At that point, I suddenly thought… From my experience as the IT manager in a research institute, I know that there are sleeping treasures in businesses: computers that still work but have been scrapped for spare parts and/or to be destroyed.
Using a search engine, I looked up the 50 biggest companies in my county, after which I looked up (or deduced, for some of them) the name and email address of the director. Next, I composed a message that would ask the companies to give me their old laptops that still worked so they’d have another life.
Oh-oh, I’ve forgotten to explain the whys and wherefores of my procedure… The idea was to gather functional computers so we could give them to students who had none at home and, in the process, give them some idea of healthy digital practices.
To put it simply, only one company replied favorably to my request, the STMicroelectronics Foundation, which donated about twenty machines. I had to join a parent-teacher association to make the gift possible. Once I had the machines, I needed to organize the project. Some of the teachers (Mrs Ott, Mrs Verdier and Mr Sahuc) became invested in the project. They identified the students who had no equipment at home, called the parents to explain the project to them, etc.… Once the students had been identified, thanks to the co-working space of the city of Montlouis (the RubixCo), I held an IT morning during which, session after session, I met with one of those students accompanied by one of his or her parents.
During that morning, I managed to : • create an awareness of the impact of electronic waste on the environment (the resources necessary to make a 2 kg laptop, the trailer of the film « Welcome to Sodom » about the DEEE dump in Ghana,…), • create an awareness of free software (origins, principles, security, as opposed to proprietary software), • and the final practical bit: the installation of a free system (Ubuntu). That practical part was also conducive to speaking of digital health (the strength of a password, how to set up Firefox to navigate the Internet, DNS on https to filter out the pornographic sites,…). Next, I showed them how to keep the system in shape (updates, adding or suppressing software), setting up Firefox (adding extensions, adjusting parameters, DOH,…), and the handling of their own data on the machine (the creation and manipulation of folders and files).
After one year of existence, all I can say is that I was very naive to think that the firms would agree to give us any machines, even those that were to be destroyed. Going further after the gifts from the STMicroelectronics Foundation, I answered project calls to find the money necessary to buy refurbished machines from specialized companies… It’s crazy or paradoxical to be forced to purchase refurbished machines while there are thousands of sleeping computers in the firms.
Beginning a year and a half ago, we have succeeded in giving equipment to 30 students. With this article, I’m also sending out a call to the readers: if there are eligible laptops in your firms, I would be happy to have them (ideally and at a minimum: 13 or 14 -inch screens, a 6th generation Intel core i5, and 4 or 8 GB of RAM. A hard drive isn’t necessary since I replace mechanical disks with SSDs).
Thank you for reading. With freedom.