A brief history of Free Geek Arkansas by Julia
The following was posted by Julia to our Blabber email list. It was arkansas. FreeGeek Arkansas. It started with a board, structured similar to HacDC’s, out of the president’s garage. It had a different guiding principal, as the goal was to educate the public, provide machinery to the public(reuse), and recycle whatever the public would drag in. We ran a “build three, take one home” program, providing all of the education and training to build the machines. To grow, our president found us a nice space (4000 square feet, on the town square!), but became overwhelmed by the organization growing. He, and many of the board members started getting hired away, and having to leave because of the recession. I was left, as treasurer, with a mostly idle board. We became tiny, organizationally, and unlike myself, almost no-one could use a soldering iron. Seeing the need for skills training, i set up my first classes, to train our board and volunteers in how to repair PCs. I set up a motherboard reworking station, and proceeded to replace the capacitors on thousands of boards, creating more