Miriam Verburg has lived in Montréal for the past eight years. She completed her BFA in 2002 and has worked as a web designer, workshop instructor and community organizer in several of Montreal’s foremost progressive and creative organizations. Her creative interests include; printmaking, drawing, web-design, blogging and houseplants.

Abstract

Exploring Opensource Creativity and a Feminist pedagogy

In 2003/2004 I developed a project at Studio XX (url: http://www.studioxx.org) a feminist new media centre based in Montreal to install and teach on Linux workstations. For this project Studio XX collaborated with XTlabs a non-profit organization that installs thin client networks. The technology we used is referred to in this document as an LTSP lab. LTSP stand for Linux Terminal Server Project.

The project took a year to complete and has been functional since February 2004.

The following essay contains a justification for making the switch to Open Source tools for creative production, a description of the technology used, and an overview of the first workshop held in the new lab.