On 4/11/06, Warren Togami <wtogami@xxxxxxxxxx> 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
