On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Tom Hoffman wrote:
First off, I welcome any contributions Fedora and/or Red Hat can
make
toward promoting Linux and open source in education. I'm a little
confused about whether Fedora == Red Hat in this case, specifically
I'm not sure how much money Fedora has at its disposal compared to Red
Hat, so the following suggestions may be pointless (that is, if there
isn't actually much money in play). But I'll make them anyhow. If
Fedora doesn't have the money maybe someone else does.
There's some money. Fedora gets its funding primarily from Red Hat. It's
not exactly a river of money -- but for this kind of thing, I think we can
make a case for enough money to hold a good conference.
There are two things I'd like to see:
Saying "the solution to this problem is to hold a conference" seems
almost as lame as saying "what we need to do now is form a committee."
But the open source in education community in the US, badly, badly
needs a national conference. Nobody really knows what's going on on
the national scale. What in God's name is going on in Indiana? Has
anyone actually talked to Mike Huffman? There's a tremendous mix of
grass-roots, corporate and larger state and district backed projects
going on, but very little coordination or information moving around.
Or if it is taking place, it is somewhere I don't know about. Most of
the key players haven't met. Many of them are using free software
because they don't have much money, which means they also don't have
much money or time to travel to conferences, either. Not to mention
networking with people from Spain, Brazil, etc., where they're plowing
ahead of us in using free software in schools. So we're long overdue
for a "Free Software in Schools Summit." We need to have one next
year.
Is there general consensus about this? And what would be the goal --
information sharing, primarily?
Increased presence of free software at all the mainstream ed-tech
conferences around the country. I'm not actually attending the
innumerable little conferences going on around the country, but my
impression is that, with a few notable exceptions (lately thanks to
Steve H.) the open source profile is quite low. This could easily be
a full time job for someone all by itself. While having strong
regional networks of open source supporters is vital, I think a few
nationally barnstorming evangelists would make a big difference, too.
How about lots of well-connected part-time evangelists who have a strong
communications network, a strong unified message, and marketing materials?
--g
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Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project ||
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