[Dfey-general-discuss] Re: [Dfey-nw-discuss] Government response to petition 'nonMSschools'

[Tim Dobson]

Isabell Long wrote:
> 2009/9/25 Paul Sutton <address@hidden>:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Government response below
> >
> > http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20711
>
> How rubbish was that response?!

As Paul pointed out, opensourceschools.org.uk does exist thanks to Becta.

The procurement process of that project raises a considerable number of 
questions but that was a considerable time ago and so we'll just leave 
it be.

opensourceschools.org.uk is currently primarily run by Miles Berry with 
some assistance from Ian Lynch as far as I can understand.

Back in June or July, you may remember I went to the Becta sponsored 
Open Source Schools unconference where I gave a talk about DFEY. There's 
a terrible video of me (I was mostly obscured by a cuddly penguin!) but 
to infer Becta does "nothing" about F/LOSS is wrong.

This isn't to say we should take the pressure off - just it's worth 
knowing what you are talking about.

One thing worth taking into consideration is that Becta is, in actual 
fact, fairly uninfluential. It's a high profile granted, but no school 
will deploy purely their suggestion - they will deploy what their 
sysadmin/consultant suggests.
Becta are solely a bureaucratic quango.

At the Open Source Schools Unconference I met gentlemen from Edugeek.net 
- Edugeek is basically a big forum based around School Sysadmins and 
Edu-ICT engineers (no focus on technologies used).

These are the people who will be suggesting to their governors and head 
teachers what they will be rolling out in the next upgrade.

These are the real technical people who need to be convinced that they 
can interact with young people and with technology in different ways.

These are the people who need to be made aware of business who can help 
them deploy Firefox & OO.o with MS Group Policy, who can help them roll 
out LTSP, who can help train them to administer LTSP.

Interesting, I think Edugeek, or the guy I met at least, seemed 
reasonably willing to engage with us. In fact, you may be aware of the 
big Educationalist conference in London in January (I've forgotten it's 
name at this moment), where all the big technology companies will have a 
presence. I think Edugeek might be willing for us to help them out on 
their stand - that was the impression I got.
I think this is a great opportunity that we should really follow up.

Another organisation worth interacting with is NAACE (naace.org. NAACE 
is a trade body of IT educationlists (teachers) or something.
Again, at the OpenSourceUnconference I met the chairman of NAACE - again 
these are the people we need to be explaining how they can help their 
technologically adept students get the most out of their schooling and 
not have their learning adversely affected by superficial barriers.

OpenSourceSchools project is running a day event at Bletchly Park 
sometime in October. It's a weekday so it probably isn't too convenient 
for most people here. I'm going to try and go to it. I've never been to 
Bletchly so it should be interesting.

We should be referring all the time to:
* Schoolsforge UK - a group of businesses who have experience deploying 
and promoting free software, specifically in schools and educational 
establishments.

* The Open Source Consortiuum - I hate the name, but this is a group of 
FOSS orientated businesses including all the major players in 
educational free software as well as the small ones.

* OSSWatch - a UK HE advisory body, there to advise Universities and 6th 
form colleges how best to interact with F/LOSS. Unfortunately doesn't 
have "Lower Education" in it's remit, but is generally sympathetic 
towards us

Since this is not region specific, I've crossposted to dfey-general-discuss
If you haven't joined it yet, I sincerely recommend joining.
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/dfey-general-discuss

Hope this provokes some thought and discussion,

Thanks,

Tim