Finally, I can post this. Written yesterday. Hopefully not obsolete. =?iso-8859-1?q?Richard=20Rothwell?= <raroth42@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Following the conference on Friday I was left with the distinct feeling that we are standing on the edge of a major breakthrough on the implementation of open source software in schools. [...]
I hope that we are! I hope it's not a false dawn, but then I'm reassured by the relatively large gathering of people with very strong ideas and motivations to make it work.
* we share information and thoughts through a Wiki thus allowing any one to get involved
I'll make sure that this is available ASAP. I've chased it up and been told that it's installed, just being tested. (There are few things more annoying than spending time editing a wiki page only to have it fail in some niche case.)
* the AFFS is invited to be the front organisation for this group (www.affs.org.uk)
I would love this to happen. If you tell us specific things that you want us to do (especially co-ordination and storing resources for you) then I will tell you when we can get it done. Depending on what happens at the annual meeting next month, we may have some seed funding to put in.
* contact is made with organisations in other countries working on similar lines
AFFS has informal links with some, but more lines of communication are always good.
* we look for a major publicity drive in September by when a number of UK schools should be runnning large scale open source solutions.
OK. An obvious thing that could be done today is to sketch out timescale ideas, projects that UK education needs and adverts that you think AFFS should try to place in the developer media to attract more developers to projects that we need. The wiki will help with these and I'll try to give a fuller list of ideas to James for the CD. Another useful idea might be a "ask for an advocate" system, where people can tell us who to contact at a particular place and then volunteers from that area who know about free software in education can offer to go along and meet them to explain the issues, drawing on the resources we've made if appropriate. Finally, the outcome can be tracked and advocates can build histories of their successes. Along with the lists of who's doing what, we can start to get a complete picture of UK education's free software use. -- MJR http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ IM: slef@jabber.at This is my home web site. This for Jabber Messaging. How's my writing? Let me know via any of my contact details.