I thought that you all may be interested in a conference we are organising. Feel free to forward this on. Find the details of the conference below. First an introduction for those who don't know.... My name is James Spedding and I work for Anglia Polytechnic University. I would like to invite you to a National Conference which will explore the use of Open Source software in the UK Primary and Secondary Education Sectors. It will run on the 4th April 2003 and the cost is expected to be under £50. Delegates from all elements of the educational community are be invited to attend this one day conference to be held at Danbury Park Conference Centre, nr Chelmsford in Essex. Speakers already include Professor Stephen Heppell of Ultralab (http://www.ultralab.ac.uk/people/stephen_heppell/), Diana Laurillard of the DfES, Theo Wright of BECTA, Roger Whittaker of SuSE UK, Malcolm Herbert of Redhat and Christopher Dawkins - network manager of Felsted School (http://www.felsted.org/curriculum/ict/network.htm). The focus of the day will be three-fold: to raise awareness of open source as an alternative solution to evaluate its suitability for use in education and, to examine and learn from the implementation of open source in educational settings The intention is to have keynote speakers in the early morning and afternoon followed by smaller seminar type groups discussing the practical implications of using open source and its various configurations. If you are interested in attending or have any ideas you want to share please contact me via email or on (01245) 226930 A major thread of the conference will be experienced-based presentations of Open Source implementations. At present I am still looking for one or two more speakers to do a 20 minute presentation about how they chose, implemented and are using (both the pro's and con's) open source solutions - from back end servers to desktop roll-outs. If any of you might be interested in this please contact me off list. This is not just a conference for those 'in the know'. As much as possible I want to open this out to a broader spectrum of the educational market. Hopefully we can change a few ideas about what OS is and what it can do! I look forward to hearing from you, James Spedding