We Support

At Foliovision we support many different arts, environmental, educational and open source organisations. The opportunity to give back and to help others try to make a better world is one of the most important forces driving us forward at Foliovision. We are grateful to have the opportunity to help others do good work.

Arts

Balletclub Wien. Ingeborg Tichy-Luger created the Balletclub Wien about twelve years ago now. In the meantime four or five artistic directors have come and gone, but Frau Tichy-Luger has continued promote dance in Vienna and in particular puts on an almost annual showcase of young choreographers called Choreolab.

Body. Dedicated to producing new dance works from young Slovak and international artists. We are particularly supportive of the choreographic work of artist Soňa Ferienčíková.

Political and Environmental

World Wildlife Fund. Our Canadian registrar Baremetal.com allows us to donate to a charity each time we renew a domain. Usually we give to World Wildlife Fund. I’d rather give more to Sea Shepherd but they are not on the list. I’m sure the WWF are doing some good and they have one of the world’s greatest logos.

World Wildlife Fund Logo

EFF. Electronic Freedom Foundation. Our newfound digital rights are already in danger of being taken away from us. EFF fights for our freedom. Their site is a great resource on what is happening online in terms of expression and repression. EFF provide free legal support to those in danger of being crushed by corporate and governmental organisations. Thank you EFF.

Informed Comment. Professor Juan Cole is another great advocate for freedom, understanding and a better world on most days. Without his light shining into the Middle East, the English language mass media would be able to keep all of us a lot deeper in the dark. Professor Cole has lost a tenured place at Yale by speaking truth to power. We are proud to support his work.

Wikileaks. Yes we give money to Wikileaks. And we are really annoyed that Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon all collaborated with the US government to steal the money we gave to support freedom of information. Regarding privacy, Google’s Eric Schmidt tells us if we have anything to be ashamed of perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it. I’d prefer he call his friends in Washington and the DOD and tell them that.

Open Source

We contribute code to WordPress.org and support over a dozen professional plugins for WordPress free of charge ourselves.

We have contributed financially to dozens of open source and free projects including:

• Xenu Link Scanner: site scanner runs on Windows.
• Cyberduck: free FTP client for OS X.
• KFM: an great online file manager, part of our Foliopress WYSIWYG.
• SequelPro: a MySQL remote database manager for OS X.
• OpenWebMail.org
• WP Super Cache. The great and reliable WordPress cache plugin from Donnche.
• FluxBB. The successor to the great PunBB. In the end we went with BBpress but it was a close call.
• UrbanGiraffe. We help maintain some of John’s excellent plugins and have donated to his plugins as well. Disclaimer: John was CTO at Foliovision for a few years in the early days.
• NetBSD.
• NeoOffice. An OpenOffice for Mac OS X. NeoOffice for years was the only way to get native interface on a Mac. We’ve moved to LibreOffice now as we find it the most stable of the three OO on Mac now but are very grateful for the hard work of Patrick Luby and Ed Peterlin.

Thank you to all those who have donated to our own open source work like Joe from EnterpriseIT.com.

Selected Past Projects

Arts

Balet Bratislava. International dance star and choreographer Mario Radačovský came back to Bratislava to run the Slovak National Theatre ballet company as artistic director. After two pretty good years, internal politics saw Mr. Radačovský dropped with no notice. With the support of Tatra Bank, Boris Kollár and a few other friends, Mario Radačovský was able to create a second international level company more focused on modern dance.

Ballet Bratislava

Series 8:08. Toronto based workshop and performance workshop collective. Many young choreographers pass through Series 8:08 on their way to (relative) greatness. Choreographer Kathleen Rea introduced me to Series 8:08.

The Vienna Review. I was a regular contributor for years while it was still a voluntary paper and was part of the Board which met to help The Vienna Review become a commercial publication. Dardis McNamee’s little paper has grown up and is now part of the Falter Verlag. I still write for The Vienna Review, but as a professional journalist again.