Free software Fridays. Let's promote participation.

One of the most enjoyable benefits of working with a not-for-profit workers' co-operative is being able to invest some time into activities that aren't exclusively tied to generating revenue. New Internationalist has long-relied on free and open source software and this year we will try to formalize our efforts to contribute back to projects that have helped along the way. The concept is "Free Software Fridays," which is something we hope will catch on at other organizations.

The concept is simple: those of us that work on technology-related aspects of New Internationalist's operation invest two hours per week, or one day a month, into supporting the free software projects that we rely on, or toward releasing the tools that we've developed internally as free software. The idea itself is open source, in the sense that we've taken the broad strokes from the idea of "Open Source Fridays" started by our friends at the Web Collective in Seattle and re-purposed them to fit with the work culture at NI.