Re: [edu-eu] address@hidden

[Christian Selig]

Hello Susan,

On Samstag, 21. September 2002 21:00, Susan Stewart wrote:
> A great idea, Christian et al... too bad US efforts are still so
> scattered.  There are good things happening, but the snowball effect
> hasn't quite begun yet.

There is this new Schoolforge project, involving a lot of parties that also 
promote non-free software, which makes it a bit problematic. Nonetheless, 
they seem to be organizing quite well.

I assume that most of the problems stem from the varying educational systems, 
which makes it sometimes hard to collaborate on development projects (i.e. 
school administration software). On the other hand, it seems to me that the 
majority of teachers don't communicate with each other, for some odd reason. 
Because of that, they encounter a high resistance of their non-technical 
collegues to anything else than MS Windows. Some politicians are kicking in 
their neck as well: It is only a minority who calls for Free Software in 
schools; most of them haven't understood what's it about. Big software 
enterprises promote the use of their proprietary stuff with millions of 
Euro/Dollars/..., because they know how weak their case is.

Besides whining ... yes, we all have got to build better networks. That's the 
reason for the FSFE educational task force. I really do invite anyone to 
join. Anyone who has contact to politicians in Europe is called to contact us 
and set up some campaigning plan with us. I'm doing this in Germany and it 
looks quite good. Someone just has to invest some time and good will.

Bye,
  Christian