Archive for the ‘Foundation’ Category

Last year we launched and ran the Humanist Action Group‘s Holiday Food Drive.

Thanks to all your generous donations we were able to provide food parcels for three local homeless shelters. We managed a total of 24 boxes packed full of a variety of different kind of food either directly donated or bought with donations. It was a good start, but we think that this year we can do a lot better!

As with last year, we need your help in three ways. First of all, we need food. That is the main part of a food drive, so any food you can donate is great. Anything which will last for a few months or more is ideal. Secondly, we need time. We need people to help us collect everything together and package it up. Finally, any money donated will be used to buy more food in bulk from wholesalers to help us fill even more boxes.

If you think you can spare some time to help those less fortune this holiday season, then please do get in contact with us. You can also sign up on Facebook, or if you want to donate, you can do so via our page on Virgin Money Giving.

Together, we can make this a truly special holiday season. Which, to me, is what the holiday season is really all about.

Chris

This is a process report on the community group management application, SocietasPro, which we announced last month.

The first iteration of the application is now complete. The developers among you can download it from GitHub. That doesn’t mean that it’s in any way complete. but as it is being developed it an iterative development cycle we want to get something out as soon as possible.

We’re hoping to have version v0.2 out by the end of the month which, all being well, will be the first version we can install and open up to gather general feedback from.

We’ve also got a shiny new logo…

Last month we held the first ever Leeds Transhumanists meetup at the Veritas bar in Leeds city centre.

We’re pleased to announce a brand new open source project which we are launching, SocietasPro.

SocietasPro is a community group management system which allows you to easily manage your society or community group. It’s currently under development and once finished will feature a members database, mailing list, events system, blog, content management system and more.

The project is open source meaning that anyone can see what we have done and take inspiration from it. We’ll be supporting the project with financial investment, technical resources and developer time. You can keep up with the project’s process here, and you can also follow the project on Twitter, @SocietasPro.

Last month, we announced the Worfolk Lecture 2011, as the second annual event since we established an annual public understanding of science lecture last year.

This year’s talk was delivered by Dr David Jenkins and was entitled “From Rutherford to the LHC”, looking at the last one hundred years of atomic research.

This month at Leeds Skeptics in the Pub, we welcomed Dr Andrew Rae presenting a talk on “Dealing Reasonably with Irrational Fear.” The talk turned out to be fantastic, probably one of the most interesting we have had this year!

The October issue of our newsletter, Engage is now available to download from our website. This quarter’s issue takes a look at the recent Sunrise Conference, our new Worfolk Lectures website, Atheist Stock and Leeds Transhumanists and has the usual round-up of news and events too.

At the September meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub, Arthur Chappell presented a talk entitled “Brainwashed! A Cult Survivor’s Tale” describing his experiences as part of the The Divine Light Mission, a cult centred around the worship of Guru Maharaj.

We’re pleased to announce the 2011 Worfolk Lecture.

Last year we announced the creation of a fund to support an annual public understanding of science lecture. The first of which took place in November with Dr Terrence Kee presenting a talk on “did life on Earth originate on Earth?” If you missed it, you can watch again in high definition on the Worfolk Lectures website.

This year’s talk will be presented by Professor David Jenkins on “From Rutherford to the Large Hadron Collider.” the event takes place on Tuesday 18 October, starting at 7pm. There will be a £2 on the door charge and all revenue will go to the host society – this year’s event will be hosted by Leeds Atheist Society and more information can be found on their website.

You can register online for the event here.

Despite there being very little of summer left here in the UK, the weather remained warm enough for us to sit outside at the September meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. This month both religion and politics were discussed – it’s a wonder how we all remain friends with such divisive topics! As ever of course though, the discussions remained good natured and very much enjoyable.