People and Planet

Who are People and Planet?
How does People and Planet use ICT?
What difference has ICT made?
What was learnt?
How to find out more

Who are People and Planet? 

People & Planet are based in Oxford and have 19 full time employees. They are a campaigning group that organise student action on world poverty and the environment. They operate on a national level and have around 150 groups in University's and Further Education colleges.

How does People and Planet use ICT? 

They have an official IT policy of using Free Software whenever possible. The long term vision is to be free of all proprietary software and the current costly “vendor lock-in”. They name five ethical and technical key reasons to use Free Software and hardware; life extension, cost, security, avoiding “vendor lock-in” and customisation.

What difference has ICT made? 

Five years ago, the entire organisation was hosted on one Microsoft Windows 95 computer. Acting as their file server, their Access database server and it ran Pegasus for their email, it was overstretched. Charlie illustrates, "When running backups, nobody could log on. As you can imagine it fell over at least once a week."
People & Planet present systems  now run on Open Source; Debian GNU/Linux "Sarge" on two local servers and a virtual server on the Internet. Between them they provide all the IT services for the organisation this includes their email, database, web hosting and seamless Windows file "shares".

They have about 25 workstations, including 3 dedicated machines for graphic design. Free Open Source Software (FOSS) applications that run on Windows 2000 have now replaced most proprietary applications except for Quark (Desktop Publishing), Quickbooks(Accounting) and Access(Customer Relationship Management). The administrators have dual booting Windows 2000 and Debian "Etch" machines.

People & Planet now has an official IT strategy, which includes a policy of using Free Software whenever possible. The long term vision is to be free of all propriertary software. There are many ethical and technical motivations that are behind People & Planet's policy, Charlie names five of the key reasons: 

1. "Vendor Lock-in"
   To avoid "Vendor Lock-in" in the future they will use software based on Open Standards. This means that will be at liberty to switch applications without the costs and hassles that proprietary standards generate. 
2. Hardware life extension
   Part of People & Planet's policy is to use recycled goods as much as possible. Making the choice not to use the latest version of Microsoft Windows means that they can use older machines to do the same work.
3. Customisation
   Free Software allows in-house customisation so that the software can be changed to fit their specific needs. Charlie believes that this 'has been crucial'.
4. Security
   "With many eyes, all bugs are shallow". It is a widely held belief that bugs and security flaws are found and fixed quickly with Free Software. In other words because the code is open, the Free Software community can 'look under the bonnet' and identify potential bugs at the source code level.
   In five years, People & Planet has only had 2 viruses. Both incidents were isolated to single machines. The minimal impact of the infections was probably due to the choice not to use Microsoft Outlook. People & Planet recognises that maintaining their security is as much with the quality of their Free Software firewalls and applications as to do with training staff. People & Planet employees are given security training which includes the discipline of never opening suspicious emails or attachments.
5. Cost
   People & Planet pays £200 for a desktop computer and a further £300 per machine for proprietary licenses. Using free Software will have obvious financial benefits.

What was learnt? 

Because their FOSS software is looked after soley by there IT support person, the organisation has needed to make sure others are aware of how to use the software rather than rely on one person, who one day may leave the organisation.

People & Planet do not have a support contract with an external IT supplier. So given that FOSS is the primary software license, where do they go for support? Their IT support worker uses the Internet and the Local Linux User Group for his support needs. Similar to the principle of sharing the software, sharing advice and expertise is a key part of the FOSS community too. He subscribes to the local Linux user group (LUG), an email list where participants can ask questions, support others and announce events about Linux.

Off-site backups are in place to cover them against the threat of physical explosions of hardware or malicious cracker attacks. Given that both the expertise and backup needs of People & Planet are addressed, I understand why they do not require an external support contract.

How to find out more 

You can contact the author of this case study:

Mark Brier
The Open Source Project @ NCC, ICTHub  
foss@ncc.co.uk

If you would like to find out more about free and open source software and how it might benefit your organisation, visit the open source pages of the website.