On 4/10/06, Warren Togami <wtogami@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Strawman Objectives for the next six months include: > ==================================================== > - Plan Fedora's involvement in Open Source in Education conferences > coming up, like the ones in ME and NH during June and July. > - Reorganize the community to better support educators in the use of > K12LTSP. > - Design messaging for the promotion of the K12LTSP model. > - Write more documentation to promote the K12LTSP model, and make it > easier to setup a K12LTSP lab. > - Professional production of an educational documentary video > demonstrating the success of the K12LTSP model. A well made video would > make it easier for LUG's worldwide to convince schools to try K12LTSP. 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 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. 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. So... consider that my wishlist ;-) --Tom
