On 4/11/06, Warren Togami <wtogami(a)redhat.com> wrote:
David Trask wrote:
> On the topic of conferences....I'm not sure how effective a national
> conference would be as you'd only attract those who can afford to fly to a
> national conference.
At least initially, we need to bring the message itself to existing
Ed-Tech conferences or directly to educators, rather than create our own
conference. People attending an Open Source in Education specific
conference would be mainly the already converted, so this would be
mostly "preaching to the choir". Not the most effective use of limited
resources.
What I imagine is more of a national open source in education
*summit*, I guess. That is, aimed at getting the people who are doing
things with Linux and open source in education together in close
physical proximity for a few days.
The most precise goal I would have is bringing together the grassroots
folks who have been doing stuff in schools for years with the rapidly
growing "enterprise" K12 Linux folk (Novell, Indiana, etc.) and also
various non-profit players (CoSN, ISTE, Stupski Foundation, Mellon
Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, etc).
One thing which convinced me of the need for a pow-wow is my
conversations with Helen King, who is the international relations
person for The Shuttleworth Foundation. She has all kinds of meetings
with people from Sun, IBM, etc., all of which seem to have people
working on a variety initiatives that I've never heard of that should
be relevant and helpful to our work, but seem to be completely
disconnected from any reality I've experienced.
I don't think ANYONE understands more than a fraction of what's
happening with open source in education right now. And if anyone does
know, they aren't telling.
--Tom