Re: [seul-edu] Forming a coalition to promote free and open tools and content in education

[Doug Loss <drloss@home.com>]

"David M. Bucknell" wrote:
> 
> It's both exciting and
> frustrating to see that each of the open source in education discussions we
> run into is at about the same stage, asking the question "What's the best way
> to convince a school or school system to give it a try?"
> 
If you hear any useful answers on other lists that we don't come up
with, could you repost them here too? :-)  Thanks.

> Why can't those of use working to promote
> free and open source tools and content capitalize on each other's efforts?

Why indeed?

> Let's create a sort of commercial/product-neutral "brand" that goes on each of
> our sites as volunteer members of this education-promoting collaborative or
> coalition (lately that word seems over-used, although appropriate for us ;-)).

What you're talking about sounds like a web-ring.  I never thought of
that before, but it might be a good idea to get all the Linux in
education sites into a web-ring.

> Participants would be defacto members of the "committee" that vets promotional
> material that could be used by anyone or any group wishing to promote free and
> open source tools and content.
> 
I think we might need a somewhat more formal vetting system, or we'll
have trouble knowing what has _been_ vetted and what hasn't.  But that's
details.

> So, we'd like to join Seul and other groups in hopes that our site will
> realize this ambition. We think we've made a good start in two months, so we
> have something to contribute to the "cause".
> 
> Obviously SEUL and OFSET and other older groups have more to contribute. We'd
> like to formalize this working group so that we can hasten the arrival of a
> consensus on the best way forward.
> 
> Interested?
> 
Definitely.  But I think we'll need the participation of at least one
major player in the Linux community to give an air of respectability to
educational people outside of the Linux community who don't yet quite
understand how we work.  Think "anchor store" at a shopping mall.  I'm
trying to get the attention of RedHat right now to see if they'll
formally come on board with this idea; we need to do the same with
Mandrake and SuSE too.  Ben Armstrong, you're probably the best
positioned of any of us to talk to Debian about participation--would
you?  Does anyone out there have contacts inside SuSE?  I think Pete St.
Onge, Roger Dingledine, and I can find someone in Mandrake.  And what
about Slackware?

Most especially, we need to make sure we don't let this idea drop.  I
don't think we'll have an opportunity quite like this for a while to
come.

Doug Loss
drloss@home.com