CorpComms Magazine

The Suffolk-based Centre for Computing History is the latest organisation to jump on board the 'tweet train', in the hopes of raising £1.5 million for a new state-of-the-art building in Cambridge.

The chair of the charity's board of trustees, Jason Fitzpatrick, who prefers the tag 'Chief geek', believes that following the unprecedented amount of Twitter followers that @CharlieSheen gained in a matter of days, it should be possible to raise the equivalent amount in money via the charity's @ComputerMuseum account, which has more than 1,600 followers, as part of its five-year business plan.

Fitzpatrick is calling his initiative the Charlie Sheen Business Model although, unlike the errant Hollywood actor, the charity is planning a more sedate approach to communication.

The first ever home computer, the Altair 8800, is part of the charity's 12,000 piece collection that now requires a 10,000 square foot building in order to showcase all the pieces. Cambridge is the location of choice, as the so-called father of computing, Charles Babbage, studied there at Trinity College.

Launched on Sunday with an 'open letter to the Twitterverse', the campaign has already raised approximately £1,500, including donations from tweeters in Germany. The initiative even attracted the attention of Neil Davidson, joint chief executive of software company Red Gate, who contributed a sizeable donation.

Davidson praised the project as a way of saying thank you to the early computer industry and noted the need to preserve the 'future and not just the past of Cambridge's role in computing history'.

Fitzpatrick emphasised that it would be 'phenomenal to have a museum made only from donations' from a virtual community.

share me: del.icio.us | digg | reddit | Tweet