Geeks Without Borders

Status Report #1

October 10, 2002

Included within this report:

Hi! Pat, your friendly neighborhood geek here, with what I hope will be the first of many happy status reports.

The e-list has been pretty quiet lately, so I thought I'd supply a brief description of where we are:

Our mission statement is completed, and Chantel will post it soon for final comments.

Hermes has registered the domains geekswithoutborders.org and gwob.org and is setting up a server to host our web site temporarily. Once that's in place, Matt, Chantel, and Dora (not necessarily in that order) can begin furiously putting up the web site.

Chantel is wading through the myriad forms we need to become both an Oregon Corporation, and a 501(c)3 tax-exempt nonprofit corporation. And having tons of fun with it, I'm sure!

I've appointed myself accountant (hope nobody minds), so Hermes, please send me copies of the receipts for domain registration, and Chantel, copies of any corporation registry fees paid. I've written a nifty little database (I like databases), and will post some sample reports for your enlightenment and amusement as soon as we have something to report.

Matt is working on redesigning our logo, so we can begin using it on all our official correspondence (of which we have none.)

In other news, I did a bit of web searching for "geeks without borders" as well as "GwoB", partly to make sure we could use the name, and to see what else was out there.

I found only a few references to "Geeks Without Borders" - all of which were people saying that someone should create such an organization. One reference on a Doctors Without Borders guestbook saying perhaps a group like that to do IT would be helpful to them, and another about someone taking computers to Guatemala in February, calling it a "Geeks without borders kind of cause". And one picture of a bunch of people in a restaurant in Mexico city labeled geeks_without_borders.jpg, but no context.

I found many references, however, to GWoB, most in three categories.. The most common was something called "Government Without Borders" which sounds like a Libertarian's nightmare, but is actually just a way of federal, state, and local governments coordinating efforts so as not to be doing the same thing and wasting time and money with clashing over jurisdiction. The other two references are much geekier, however. I found many references in Pokemon-related chatrooms to GWOB. Unfortunately, I don't speak pokemonese well enough to figure out what the heck they're talking about. It seems to be a verb, though ("...then I gwobbed his charizard and..."). If anyone knows a nine-year-old, you might want to ask...

And the third, and geekiest reference, is to THE most powerful monster in nethack (AKA hack, rogue, or angband). (If you've never heard of these, ask a real geek to explain :-) Down in the lower levels, if your character is powerful enough, you might encounter the Great Worm of Balance, aka the GWoB. And many are the hushed and fearful whispers of such a beast throughout usenet...

'Til next time...Make Mine Marvel!

-Pat