Re: [school-core] Affero's concept

["Douglas S. Blank" <dblank@brynmawr.edu>]

Affero is providing a service to allow people that don't necessarily know how
to program, a method to participate in the free/open source community.

We would like to do something similar: we want to give people the tools to
market their free/open source products at http://www.edvisor.org. So, if
someone didn't necessarily have programming skills, they might have artistic
skills to create banners, text, and other graphics to help attract users to a
product. 

In fact, I've talked to Chris Reed at Affero about combining these free ads
with their donation service. This would open the path to possibly more people
being exposed to educational free software, and allowing more people to
participate in the community.

If Schoolforge does embrace links from Affero, or ads from Edvisor.org, then
there are some issues that could come up: what happens if another company
comes around with a donation method, or an ad server? How will Schoolforge
decide which company to "do business" with? Share? Lowest bidder?

These points bring up the sticky business of doing business. One might want to
avoid these kinds of issues by rejecting money and support for individual
for-profit businesses altogether. But, if Schoolforge accepts the challenge of
dealing with these issues, it could truly help advance the cause.

I hope Schoolforge can come up with a policy, and I hope more opportunities
are explored to allow people other than programmers to participate in the
community.

-Doug Blank

Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net> said:

> Just so we can continue the discussion on this, I'd like to say
> something about where financial support would be very useful.
> 
> About a year or so ago we realized at SEUL/edu that we were talking
> to people who already understood and agreed with our positions, but
> we weren't reaching people outside that group who we needed to
> convince.  What we (and all of us here, actually) need to do is to
> present the case for free and open resources in education to the
> _educational_ community, not to each other.  To do that, we need to
> attend educational conferences as exhibitors.
> 
> Unfortunately, that's not nearly as easy to do as it is to attend
> Linux conferences.  The educational community expects to be marketed
> to, but not to be approached by grass-roots organizations.  For that
> reason, exhibitor space at its conferences is ofter prohibitively
> expensive, precluding participation by any except corporations.
> That's a self-fulfilling prophecy situation, but there it is.  Any
> funds we could generate should (I think) go toward having a presence
> at various technology in education conferences around the world.
> That would include exhibitor fees, lodging and travel expenses for
> participants, etc.  These things would require not insubstantial
> amounts of money, but would have the greatest potential for
> broadening the reach of our message.
> 
> Outside of finding some well-to-do and generous sponsors, I think
> the Affero donation method may be the best way we have of generating
> the funds for such things as this.
> 
> --
> Doug Loss                 All I want is a warm bed
> Data Network Coordinator  and a kind word and
> Bloomsburg University     unlimited power.
> dloss@bloomu.edu                Ashleigh Brilliant
> 
> 

-- 
Douglas S. Blank,       Assistant Professor         
dblank@brynmawr.edu,          (610)526-6501
Bryn Mawr College,  Computer Science Program
101 North Merion Ave,  Park Science Building
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 dangermouse.brynmawr.edu