As part of moving the technical maturity of both Anam Cara House Geelong and Bonnie Babes forward, I was investigating was free and / or open source software tools were available for volunteer and donor management. After a quick look around SourceForge and trying a couple of these out (eg iVolunteer), the best one available appears to be CiviCRM. This has a number of features including;

• integration with both Drupal and Joomla
• the ability to create groups within the contact database (for instance some donors are also volunteers, some volunteers are also members of the board of management)
• the ability to integrate online paymen with CiviCRM so that online donations are tracked
• event management – including the tracking of which contacts have participated or attended which events
• relationship tracking  – including recording relationships between contacts (such as mother, brother etc)

There is also a live online demo of CiviCRM that is very useful for providing organisations with an overview, or in depth exploration of functionality – suitable for requirements elicitation.

The software also seems to have a lot of support and a mature development team behind it – which augers well for future improvement of CiviCRM.

Registrations are now open for Software Freedom Day, which will be held on 20 September 2008.

So, what is Software Freedom Day (from the website);

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities.

Not sure on details for the Melbourne event, when more is known I will post further.

w00t! Another knitting project is finally complete. This time it’s a long, warm scarf in Paton’s Inca (colourway 7005 lavender/grey) for Jen, to match the recently-finished Jen’s Open Star Stitch Beanie. Like the beanie, this was a great way to use up leftover wool.

However, rather than just a normal rib scarf, I wanted to experiment with texture a little – and wondered whether Paton’s Inca would take well to openwork. I’m a beginner with knitted lace, but open star stitch is not too hard to do.

Really, the only hurdle I found was getting an appropriate gauge for open star stitch – this knits to a tighter gauge that stocking stitch or garter stitch, so I had to go up to 8.0mm needles from the regular 7.00mm ones that normally yield correct gauge for Inca.

The pattern is dead simple – open star stitch – and is worked over four rows:

Using 8.00mm and Patons Inca (7 x 50g balls required for scarf, 1 x 50g ball required for optional fringe), cast on a multiple of 3 stitches. For the garment shown, 42 stitches were used.

R1: K4, cast off second stitch that was knitted by slipping it over R needle. K3, *cast off the first of the three, yfwd*. Repeat from * to * until one stitch remains, K1.

R2: purl

R3: K2, yfwd, *K3, cast off the first of the three, yfwd*. Repeat from * to * until two stitches remain, K2.

R4: purl

Repeat until scarf reaches desired length, cast off on either R2 or R4 in purl, sew in ends.

Add a fringe if desired by looping 2-3 strands of inca through one of the eyelets made by open star stitch and tying into a knot.