David, We're collecting stuff together and will post to the Schoolforge-UK website as it comes in. Most newsworthy were Prof Hargreaves' endorsement of the open source development model, Dougal Gill's initiative to improve the database component in Open Office, and speaker after speaker who presented tangible benefits and savings they're getting from FLOSS. Exhibitors included Addison UK, The Learning Machine, Hypercube Systems, NetProject, The OpenCD Project, and myself asking for help with www.schoolforge.org.uk. Hey, exhibitors at a FLOSS conference! It was a great day. John Ingleby ************ On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 19:02, David Bowles wrote:

Alas I wasn't able to make it to FLOSSIE after all!

Can some kind soul please outline to me what happened at FLOSSIE (or give me a web URL), and let me know what is likely to happen next?

Thank's in advance,

David Bowles -- John Ingleby

CoroNet Information Systems Ltd. Kings Langley, UK www.coronet.co.uk

On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 11:24, Adam wrote:

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 19:39:42 +0000 John Ingleby wrote:

...

Most newsworthy were Prof Hargreaves' endorsement of the open source

Did anyone happen to keep a copy of Hargreave's powerpoint presentation? I think I'd be able to cobble notes together with that as a prompt. If so, can it be made available over the net (with his permission)?

Can we chip our notes in on the wiki? Anyone going to break the ice and start, or is a more formal method preferred?

Yvonne is currently getting permission off all the speakers to use their presentations. As soon as this is done I can send you them - I have all of them apart from the SchoolTool one on my laptop. If you will volunteer (and anyone else) to do the necessary on the Wiki it would be very useful as I have a deadline coming up and not much time. I am also talking to people at Aston and Birmingham Unis about the database project. We have the support of the OpenOffice.org project and Dougal and East Hull CLC. There are sources of funding around that like this sort of cooperative endeavour so hopefully we can get this project off the ground but its going to take a bit of juggling. If anyone else is interested in a "better than Access" replacement for Access let me know -at some point it might need a separate mailing list. If we can get some small contributions from Schools as Dougal suggested it will make the case a lot stronger. If its difficult to get school money, maybe just have a fund raising event. For example, if we could get 10 large secondary schools to raise £500 each I think we could probably get a grant to get a PhD student working pretty well full time on such a project combining it with educational research in the use of databases. -- ian