Taking a peek inside the Bicester Green Hub

Having moved earlier in the year from a tiny 7.5sqm shared space in The Stables, to a new 15sqm dedicated space within the 200sqm space at 16 Sheep Street, the Bicester Green GOO team have been busy making the space perfect for refurbishing devices and handing them over to recipients or recipient organisations. Led expertly by Chris, the GOO team have installed servers, connections, networks, switches and ports, most of which had to be transferred from the old site with fresh connections throughout the wider space. While Chris can do most of this in his sleep, the opportunity to teach the next generation of IT experts was too good to be missed. Most of our Saturday team are young persons working towards their Duke of Edinburgh (DofE) awards, all of whom have a keen interest in IT and Computer Science, so to earn the practical, hands-on experience of setting up the space is invaluable, and skill sharing is the essence of what Bicester Green represents.

Our space is not yet completed, and will remain a work in progress for some time yet, as we evolve and adapt depending on the volume of devices in and the flow of devices out. However, we are able to boast 18 deployment ports, the same number of power sockets, a deployment server, device testing server, certified disk wiping server, work space for 8 people (as long as they don’t start dancing!), and storage for several hundred devices at any one time. And in his spare time, Chris ensured that all parts of Bicester Green (across two sites) had online access and could utilise our own network.

The entire move and refit was a Bicester Green wide team effort, with benches bespoke made by the wood team, lighting and power connected by our electrical team and all the organising, tea and coffee provision and arranging by the bicycle and shop team.

So far in our new space we have processed more than 300 devices, not all of these are ready or will reach new recipients, but rest assured they will all be used in some way for Getting Oxfordshire Online.