I just ran across this user group that might be of interest to those of you who are dealing with the technical challenges of using open-source/freeware research tools: Ottawa PC Users’ Group. As per the group’s History page, this group was founded in the pre-World Wide Web era of restricted Internet access were peer-support was an important factor in gaining access to software, training, and connectivity. I would encourage researchers to think about user groups that might be pertinent to their work; downloading software is easy today but training is extremely expensive and operating systems often introduce glitches that are not present in controlled lab environments.
Lucas Jerusalimiec 