The Academic Computer Club at the Umeå University in Sweden is a major supporter of open source projects. ACC UMU hosts one of the popular free software mirrors, and is one of the official sponsors of the Debian open source software distribution, maintaining a few of the project’s servers. The club supports two more well-known projects, the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) and Freenode. Both projects provide communication facilities that benefit free software communities.
The club is supported by Umeå University with room, power and networking. The university does not involve itself with the particular projects that are taken up by the club, says Mattias Wadenstein, one of the members. According to him, most open source related activities at Umeå University are organised by the Academic Computer Club.
Club membership is open to both students and staff, Wadenstein says. “Membership is a great gateway to become a Unix system administrator, for those willing to take that up.”
University staff members such as Wadenstein are involved in the computer club, using it as an umbrella to contribute to open source communities. The club also offers members a platform to do some technical development, he adds, “using computing platforms that are not as critical as those for our day jobs on high performance computers, or for our tasks at the computer science department.”