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RE: [school-discuss] Updated Coalition Procedures - Members sign up here
Justin,
It's now been 12 days since I sent in the first email (on
December 15th), and 9 days since this one was sent in (on the 18th). I am
becoming very concerned with the lack of response to my inquiries, since I feel
I'm being put in an untenable position whereby all organizations I submitted,
specifically General Education Online and International Education Resources,
were removed from membership without following Schoolforge Coalition procedures
(as defined at http://www.schoolforge.net/coalitionprocedures),
and without any prior warning to myself, and regardless of the fact that I am,
in fact, following Schoolforge Coalition operational guidelines by providing a
link to the front page of the schoolforge website and continuing active work on
my projects.
I must ask again that you add General Education Online and
International Education Resources to the new membership roster (having failed to
follow coalition procedures), or, failing that, provide a reason why the
organizational membership for said organizations was revoked without regard to
process. If I don't see a response soon, I will have very little recourse
but to remove the links I am providing to Schoolforge (as Schoolforge is not, in
turn, providing reciprocal links to the organizational websites on the current
membership page).
Again, please respond at your earliest possible
convenience.
Sincerely,
Michael Viron
President & CEO, General Education
Online
Justin,
As part of the new membership list has now been made
public, please provide a response at your earliest possible convenience.
If I don't receive a response soon, I will have very little choice but to remove
the reciprocal link being provided on my website to Schoolforge (since
Schoolforge is in turn failing to provide a link to my website via the "new"
members listing page).
Based on the Schoolforge Operating Procedures (http://www.schoolforge.net/coalitionprocedures),
which state "Groups in the coalition would need to be active, defined as
having their website/CVS/documents/whatever-their-primary-project-is updated at
least once every 6 months. Groups not meeting this requirement will be declared
inactive members, with no vote in coalition management until they do begin
updating things again. After a similar period as inactive members, groups would
be removed from the coalition.", there are 2 criteria that must be met for
an organization to be removed:
1) Failure to update their primary project for a period of
6 months, at which point the organization would be placed on "inactive"
status.
2) After placement on inactive status, no
activity for a minimum of 6 months.
Only after 1 and 2 have been met (meaning a minimum
timeframe of no activity for 1 year), can an organization be removed from
membership.
Also, "open resources" are defined as being part of
Schoolforge's mission. Specifically, it states "SchoolForge's mission is
to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open
resources for primary and secondary education." As such, the earlier
comment that seems to imply that "free / open resources" are not welcome as
members, directly contradicts the mission statement of
Schoolforge.
Again, please provide a response at your earliest possible
convenience.
Thank you,
Michael Viron
President & CEO, General Education
Online
Justin,
Let me address your concerns, as
follows:
1) While General Education Online does provide an
"open-source" copy of the software powering the
findaschool.org website (albeit not currently licensed under a specific
license atm), producing software is incidental to the primary goal of General
Education Online (to provide certain free / open resources to
others). You'll find that copies of the source-code for the software
developed to run the website can be found at http://www.findaschool.org/releases/
.
2) Due to certain requirements in listing facilities (ie,
verification of accreditation, existance, etc), General Education Online has not
historically allowed individuals outside the organization to directly add
requests, although they are certainly free to email such requests in. Many
of these requirements are to try to ensure the validity and accuracy of
those entities in our directory. I'm not necessarily opposed to open
collaboration, per-se, but I have valid concerns regarding providing open access
to the admin functions of the portal (which would potentially affect
the validity and accuracy of information available). If you can suggest an
alternative, while still maintaining the validity and accuracy that GEO's
findaschool.org portal is known for, I'd greatly appreciate the
input.
The other projects, as they are still very early in the
design / development stage (aside from the disaster blog (v0.02alpha of the
Education Disaster Information System), powered by open-source blog software
Serendipity), have not yet released any code / software. As a matter of
fact, everything from the design stages forward are open to community
involvement on these other projects.
I'm concerned with the statement "As for SchoolForge
Coalition membership, for now your entries are rejected.", which seems to
indicate that no organization is presently considered a member of Schoolforge,
even though General Education Online (and many other organizations) had already
previously been accepted into membership. This also raises the question as
to who decides to "close" a member's membership standing in Schoolforge,
notification procedures, and so forth, which are not currently
documented. My strong recommendation is that the decision not be made only
by a single individual and that some type of procedural guidelines be
established for such things.
The other question I have, is since I have submitted the
information previously, do I now, based on your response, have to resubmit the
list in its entirity?
Thank you for your time,
Michael Viron
President & CEO
General Education Online, A Schoolforge Founding
Member
International Education Resources, A General Education
Online organization
Michael, these are good questions.
"I must again mention something regarding
the narrow definition of "FLOSS" on the website which seems to indicate
that "free / open resources" are not welcome as members of schoolforge.
This is in direct contradiction to the founding principles which allowed for
those projects that provide web-based open resources which may or may not
include providing a copy of the underlying "software" that powers the
site."
Actually, there are no contradictions to the founding principles
in this definition. Over the years since the founding principles were laid
out, the 'web services' landscape has made enough ground that we can start to
see what utilities share our view of free and open, and can be used to create
even better resources in the future. A site such as Wikipedia, for example,
serves as an example of a 'web service' that is free and open - and facilitates
the principles of unity and resource building through collaboration that
SchoolForge was founded on.
Free (cost wise) resources are a great
thing, but using that along with SchoolForge principles seems flawed. An
example could be that Mac offered to provide their operating system free to the
OLPC project for free, which was turned down on the basis that it's not open
source. I think Microsoft has offered their OS for free to schools that
were going with open source alternatives. In both of these cases, it's the
licensing of the open source tools that has prompted a response of lower
costs/free resources.
As for SchoolForge Coalition membership, for now
your entries are rejected. I think what you provide are wonderful
resources, and I invite you to resubmit your request when your resources can be
accessed without any question as to whether they meet the definition of "FLOSS"
as provided on the website. I'm willing to work with you towards reaching
that, but if that isn't the direction you want to go - please make this point
clear.
Thanks,
Justin