[K12OSN] Fedora Education Initiative Launch

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Tom Hoffman wrote:

> First off, I welcome any contributions Fedora and/or Red Hat can make
> toward promoting Linux and open source in education.  I'm a little
> confused about whether Fedora == Red Hat in this case, specifically
> I'm not sure how much money Fedora has at its disposal compared to Red
> Hat, so the following suggestions may be pointless (that is, if there
> isn't actually much money in play).  But I'll make them anyhow.  If
> Fedora doesn't have the money maybe someone else does.

There's some money.  Fedora gets its funding primarily from Red Hat.  It's 
not exactly a river of money -- but for this kind of thing, I think we can 
make a case for enough money to hold a good conference.
 
> There are two things I'd like to see:
> 
> Saying "the solution to this problem is to hold a conference" seems
> almost as lame as saying "what we need to do now is form a committee."
>  But the open source in education community in the US, badly, badly
> needs a national conference.  Nobody really knows what's going on on
> the national scale.  What in God's name is going on in Indiana?  Has
> anyone actually talked to Mike Huffman?  There's a tremendous mix of
> grass-roots, corporate and larger state and district backed projects
> going on, but very little coordination or information moving around. 
> Or if it is taking place, it is somewhere I don't know about.  Most of
> the key players haven't met.  Many of them are using free software
> because they don't have much money, which means they also don't have
> much money or time to travel to conferences, either.  Not to mention
> networking with people from Spain, Brazil, etc., where they're plowing
> ahead of us in using free software in schools.  So we're long overdue
> for a "Free Software in Schools Summit."  We need to have one next
> year.

Is there general consensus about this?  And what would be the goal -- 
information sharing, primarily?

> Increased presence of free software at all the mainstream ed-tech
> conferences around the country.  I'm not actually attending the
> innumerable little conferences going on around the country, but my
> impression is that, with a few notable exceptions (lately thanks to
> Steve H.) the open source profile is quite low.  This could easily be
> a full time job for someone all by itself.  While having strong
> regional networks of open source supporters is vital, I think a few
> nationally barnstorming evangelists would make a big difference, too.

How about lots of well-connected part-time evangelists who have a strong 
communications network, a strong unified message, and marketing materials?

--g

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