And this as well ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Re: Free Software Academy Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 17:24:07 -0700 From: minddog To: Peter Minten , Gopal V , James Michael DuPont , chris@nfluid.com, miguel@ximian.com If I'm not mistaken Peter Minten wrote: > Hi guys, > > here's what I cooked up in a few hours about FSA: > > -- organization -- > > Though it's to early to do a large amount of organization planning I highly > suggest creating a steering committee as highest authority within FSA. The > SC system worked great in DotGNU (well until about everybody on the SC > became to busy to actually do something (except Rhys) :-). So we can learn from that. I propose a government for our system so that we can organize through a simple loop with checks and balances. Let me show you my view of the organization through a tree structure. Freedom Software Academy _____________/________|____________|_____________\____________________ Students WG ||| Wake-Up WG ||| Software WG ||| Standards WG | (School Districts, | | | Gov, Colleges) | | _______\______________\______________\__________________\___________ | | | |_ | | An organization to teach | | \Display Formats - | the members of the | | What, How, Where is available | society of the pros Developers willing to | A place to mirror | and cons of donate time for the cause | freeware and | free software. docs. |_ | | | \Data Formats | | What, How, Where is available | | A place to mirror freeware and docs. | |_ \Active Student leaders that represent | each local chapter's student population. This is a rough structure of how we can visualize a government of our own. _______ / \ /_________\ | Institution | ----> Doesn't understand Free Software |_________| , like's power point and shows all its educational material in it. O _ |_ ---> Student: / \ A gnu/linux guru who doesn't use anything but the command line. He wants to see some of his in-class presentations at home. But there are no texinfo, postscript,html, or pdf formats. His Solution: Nag teacher, teacher ignores him. His Solution with FSA backing: Nag teacher, Teacher ignores him, CC the ignored student's with a request to have the FSA contact the teacher. (FSA-fileformat@fsa.gnu.org) or online web form /// ???TBD /// Teacher learns that what she/he is doing is causing her material in the classroom to be partly copyrighted by microsoft...yada yada..educate!! Teacher downloads software to easily convert her/his file formats to standard ones. She/he and her students are now very happy! How can we perform outside interaction without being poured in? And still be able to keep 100% problem solving? We'll have to invent every scenario and have a large FAQ put together. Then we can review these and try to invent some type of universal input for everyone so that we can handle all requests. > -- time plan -- > > As decided on the meeting the timeplan of FSA will be divided into > milestones. While most of the waves are still invisible I can see the > zeroth and the first one. > > We're currently in the zeroth wave. In this wave the focus of FSA is mainly > getting up and running, I think we can all agree on that statement. This > wave will last t/m (Dutch for until but including) the chat-a-thon. > > It's very important not to end the zeroth wave too soon since we first need > to get all basic stuff online. In the first wave expansion will be the main > goal. Expansion will crash FSA however if we aren't prepared for it. The > idea of putting the chat-a-thon away 2 months therefore seems highly > recommendable. I highly second this, but we need to start with some type of PR now! I have been letting people know about this left and right. We need a universal way of educating the student that we are here to help. > -- declarations -- > > We will need a number of different declarations and papers, each aimed at a > specific target group except the first. > > The first declaration is the 'declaration of software freedom in schools' > (if anybody knows a more elegant name please say it). > > We also need plain declarations for schools (why free software is good for > you), for existing student groups (why to join the FSA) and for students > (why should you care about free software). > > I recommend creating a working group to produce these declarations and > translate them into different languages. Okay see my tree, see if we can mold this into one of the four i created. Else we can add a new one and so on. > -- packages -- > > The FSA (or more exactly the package working group of the FSA) will produce > packages. The packages will contain (free and open source) software, > reasonably complete documentation (tutorial + reference manual) and tips on > how the software can be used in a learning enviroment. I think we should take a little more abstract approach and divide up the jobs to different WG's of the FSA. Like you set before about a steering committee, we should develop one from a government system we can design. > -- teacher assist system -- > > We should assist teachers in developing courses based on free software. For > this purpose one or more mailing lists and irc channels should be used. A > wiki system is also very good for this. Good support will bring satisfied > schools that won't switch back very fast and that will be positive about > free software to other schools (peer advertisment is always very > effective). Yup already thinking about this. Wiki is best since not every teacher knows about irc. There are those blackboard systems that university's use too. We could become a Club that belongs to the blackboard and setup a system there. Or better yet, our software WG can create a set of plugins to each system a university would use. If Blackboard, we'll have a FSA blackboard plugin. If Wiki, we'll have a FSA wiki plugin/custom version. and so on... That's my bit for now, carry on with more ideas!! regards, -- --minddog( Adam Ballai ) "I try to take it one day at a time, but several of them attack me at once." -mistyflip ------------------------------------------------------- -- --minddog( Adam Ballai ) "I try to take it one day at a time, but several of them attack me at once." -mistyflip