Providence Geeks meet about once a month in the storefront at AS220, 115 Empire Street, to mill, drink beer, dine, and watch a presentation by a geek.

The next meet is this Wednesday, from 5:30 p.m. to 9 or so.

The presentation:

SchoolTool: Managing an International, Philanthropically Funded Open Source Project from a Victorian in Elmwood

"by long-time Providence Geek Tom Hoffman. Tom will present SchoolTool, the open source project he manages, and discuss free software philanthropy. Details here. "

More on Tom, a longtime Providence blogger:

How did a former Providence school teacher end up working for a South African entrepreneur/philanthropist/cosmonaut, managing programmers in Lithuania and users in Nepal?  SchoolTool is a project to create free administrative software for schools around the world, written in Python and Zope 3, funded by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.

We’ll take a look at the software itself as well as the unique advantages andchallenges of free software philanthropy.

If you've wanted to check these gigs out, this sounds like a good one to start with. It's a comfortable, casual crowd. Everybody gets a nametag, so don't worry about socially awkward moments.