Some new initiatives are the result of careful cultivation and planning, while others grow like weeds in fertile ground. Oso Martin came up with the seed of FREE GEEK in 2000, and he has been tending to its unruly growth ever since.

When the idea came to him, Oso had given up his career as an architect and was volunteering full time on various community building projects in Portland. He remembers, "While I was working on planning for Earth Day 2000, I had a conversation with the campaign director for the Greenhouse Network - a guy by the name of Matt Follett. We were just shooting the breeze and I came up with this idea: what we need to do is find a way to take donated computers and fix them up and give them to activists so that they've got email as a communication tool." Matt liked the idea immediately and encouraged Oso to pursue it.

Oso's first response? "You do it! I'm busy doing lots of other stuff." But Matt didn't give up, and the next day he told Oso his group would donate several computers and the money to file for nonprofit status. Oso remembers, "That was like the light bulb going off. And I thought, well, how do you make something like this work?"

Oso knew there were plenty of old computers available; he dreamed up a closed loop system where volunteers would refurbish unwanted computers in exchange for a computer of their own. He laughs now at his hope that this system wouldn't require any money. FREE GEEK was the first name that came to him, and he jumped online and registered the domain name with his credit card.

Says Oso, "So forty-eight hours from the light bulb, I've got a web site up. Click! It exists!" At least a web page existed, and the pile of old computers in Oso's dining room. A couple of weeks later, FREE GEEK got its first donation from Jim Deibele, the founder of a local internet service provider. Oso used that $2,500 to make FREE GEEK a sponsor of Portland's Earth Day 2000 celebration, which meant publicity.

"I had a booth for Earth Day and I had a web page, so I printed up some T-shirts and some brochures." He also had two sign-up lists: "One list for people to help, one for people to receive a free computer, if and when we got things going." A dozen people expressed interest in receiving a computer, while a whopping 75 indicated they would like to help make FREE GEEK happen. The local press caught wind of it and, as Oso says, "That just got the ball rolling."

A board of directors was pulled together and Jim Deibele donated a larger chunk of money. "We gambled that we could take that money and find somebody to agree to a three or four month lease, and hoped that we could raise more money by the time we ran out. And that's exactly what happened." FREE GEEK opened in August 2000 in a warehouse in southeast Portland.

Just six months after Oso had launched a FREE GEEK web page, he had 5,000 square feet, a phone, a couch, about 85 computers, and a steady stream of volunteers. For aspiring computer owners, FREE GEEK offers two main programs. "Earn A Computer" allows anyone to trade 24 hours of work for a computer. "You do three basic jobs: receiving and data entry; testing of the components that are potentially reusable; and recycling the stuff that's no good." This program is open to anyone, not just activists as Oso originally envisioned. "As we like to jokingly say, if Bill Gates was to walk in here tomorrow and say, 'hey, I want to volunteer 24 hours so I can earn a computer,' we would not have a problem with that, even though we know he can afford a computer. Anybody who is willing to give time, we're willing to help."

The "Build A Computer" program has a similar structure. "We'll teach you how to build computers if you promise to finish six. If you finish those, you can keep the sixth one for yourself." Some folks who learn how to build computers become volunteer teachers themselves. "We try to have this perpetuating cycle of builders coming in. At least 40% of the time we're open, there's a build class going on." Volunteers also teach advanced programming and database classes, which are free to FREE GEEK volunteers.

Oso describes his clients as "the most culturally diverse group I have ever worked with." While most people come from Portland, "You name a town in Oregon and chances are somebody came in here and either dropped something off to be recycled, came to the thrift store and bought something, or came down and volunteered to do some work." He admits, "We have often sat and thought, 'How do we make it so there is not quite so much male energy here all the time?'" One solution has been to offer women-only classes with "not a single guy around to say, 'Well, I know it all!'" Home schooling groups have also been making use of the networked classroom.

The Oregonian did a story about FREE GEEK in January 2001 that mentioned "free computers." Oso says, "That was it. We were never not busy from that day on." FREE GEEK went from signing up six aspiring computer owners a week to 300 in three days; the waiting list backed up five months. "Now it's back down to about three weeks, so we've kind of been forced to be much more efficient than perhaps we wanted to be." So far, 1,300 people have worked or are working towards owning their own computer.

"Nobody had really done this before and we had no model to follow. At every preliminary stage we would just take some wild guess at what we thought things would be like and just remember that we needed to remain flexible."

Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality provided some funding in 2000, and FREE GEEK was expecting to receive a second grant in 2001. But due to a bureaucratic snafu, the grant was not submitted in time. Oso remembers, "This is December 15th and we hear, 'You're not getting any money next year.' And so a big panic ensued. I thought, that's it. We're going to be kicked out of our space and there's nothing we can do."

Oso can now say, "All the crises we've had have just made us get our act together that much faster." They had been reluctant to get into the resale business. "The idea of selling stuff just seemed antithetical to what we were doing. But, if we don't have a space to work in, we can't do any good for anybody, and space isn't free." In the scramble to stay afloat, FREE GEEK opened a thrift store, which now covers about a third of their budget. The store sells the equipment that cannot be given away, and the rest is recycled.

Oso figures they have salvaged over 170 tons of material. Salvage of copper, gold and steel in unusable old computers accounts for another quarter of FREE GEEK's budget. "In less than three years we started making as much money as we were spending." With this diversified funding, reliance on grants has dropped every year, and currently represents just 12% of FREE GEEK's budget. Oso acknowledges, "The one thing I didn't really give a lot of thought to ahead of time was the recycling process. I just assumed that we would get a whole bunch of old computers and someone would come by and take them for money, because I know there's gold in them. I thought, how hard can that be?"

It turned out to be quite a bit harder. When information about dangerous disposal of electronic waste in Asia came out, Oso realized he didn't know enough about the folks who were buying his unusable equipment. "So I've become an electronics recycler by default." FREE GEEK now requires that all of their materials be handled domestically, even though it is more expensive. FREE GEEK has received over 9,000 computers to date; anyone can drop one off, paying just a small fee to cover handling of the monitors. About 50% of what comes in is recycled, and 1,500 computers have been put back into circulation thus far.

Finding the right software technology turned out to be another key to FREE GEEK's success. "You talk with Microsoft and it looks like there are possibilities, but it was really restrictive. Once you start looking at the small print, you realize, my gosh, this isn't going be helpful." Microsoft's strict licensing requirements would have required FREE GEEK to pay $90 for almost any computer using even an old version of Windows. "The computers are not worth $90." And the current software Microsoft might be willing to donate doesn't run well on old hardware.

Free, open-source software called Linux proved to be a better option. "Linux is a lighter load on the computer than Windows, so we're running a totally modern operating system which on many levels is comparable to Microsoft XP, but it's running on a computer from 1997." FREE GEEK has tinkered a bit with the software, to make it familiar to Windows or Mac users. "We're able to give these computers to people who have never really used computers before." Oso predicts that once the general public is aware of Linux, the "horrible cycle" of constant software and hardware upgrades will be ended. "I feel really good about the product that we create, and in a certain sense, we're a computer factory."

The use of Linux has another invaluable benefit. "It also attracted computer tech savvy people that were really passionate about giving stuff away, helping other people. Had we set up our system using commercial software, we'd have gotten a few volunteers to help out, but we have had more than 300 very dedicated volunteers on the technical end of things."

"We were told early on, 'Oh, you'll never get a volunteer system administrator for your network. At some point, you're going to have to hire a network administrator and you're going to have to pay them market wages, which at a minimum is going to be $50,000 a year.' We've had a volunteer group of system administrators doing this thing for free since we started, and our network - which we've never bought anything for, never paid anybody to help set up, administer, or anything - the in-kind value of that is probably over a half a million dollars by now. That's all come because it's a Linux system and people want to play with the stuff. They want to learn about it."

When asked why FREE GEEK doesn't charge for any of the computer skills classes that would cost a pretty penny elsewhere, Oso has a compelling argument. "It's a financially sound thing to do, in that by offering these free classes, which in general really don't cost us much to produce, we keep people here that do stuff for us that is worth thousands and thousands of dollars in salaries we don't have to pay to system administrators or database programmers. People come because they can hang out and they can learn, and in the process of learning they do tasks for us. So it is a money saver for us to give education away, in that sense."

FREE GEEK seems to exist in an alternate economic sphere, where you thrive the more you give away. FREE GEEK computers have found new homes as far away as Ecuador and El Salvador. And all of their software and documents are freely available on the internet; another FREE GEEK is already up and running in Indiana.

Oso’s whole operation currently functions on a shoestring $100,000 budget. In its first year, Oso was the only paid staff member, and he acknowledges, "I didn't sleep at all." Now there are eight paid staff, working more reasonable schedules, but as Oso says. "Nobody is drawing a market rate salary, which is somewhat unsustainable in the long term." FREE GEEK staff recently opted for raises over staff expansion.

Like its founder, the FREE GEEK warehouse buzzes with activity and enthusiasm. Stations for dissection, resurrection, and even art create some order amongst the towering piles of old technology. In the coming year, FREE GEEK hopes to more than double its capacity and build two more classrooms. "One of the classrooms is actually going to double as a public internet access point, so there are going to be six or eight terminals in there that anyone can just come in off the street and use."

"It's been a pretty wild ride, and it went on for quite some time before I even had a chance to stop and catch my breath and say, "Wow! That was pretty cool!"

Contact
FREE GEEK
Oso Martin
1731 SE 10th Avenue
Portland, OR 97214
503.232.9350
www.freegeek.org
info@freegeek.org