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 ------------------------------------------------------------- Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors -------------------------------------------------------------
