David,
Yes. I agree.
Marilyn
On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:27:04 +0700, David Bucknell wrote:
This is an interesting idea. It may be that you are right; however, as exciting as it would be to get the old engine fired up, before we jump into that kind of role, and I am certainly for a more vital group, let's look at our mission. My question is whether our role is to champion particular projects or to foster the communication and cooperation between them. I think it's the latter and that it would be up to member organizations (or projects, perhaps in combination) to champion whatever particular combinations they find compelling. Here's the "mission" statement from the Web site: "SchoolForge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education. SchoolForge is intended to empower member organizations to make open educational resources more effective, efficient, and ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and increasing the transparency of development. SchoolForge members advocate the use of open source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the advancement of education and the betterment of humankind." The problem with choosing some projects above the rest is that it would not be unifying the members. Now, that said, perhaps a powerful (and wealthy) organization could shake us all up and focus us on a common set of "features" and goals. But I don't think that would be in the spirit of "fostering" all comers. What about this: * We encourage cross-polination more strongly. Some projects may want to merge, some might think it time to die out, and other new ones might (and should) be born. * We regularly celebrate the individual project-members and call attention to their strengths with suggested scenarios of how schools can benefit from them. * If groups such as Open SIS want to join and create super-tools or more finely aimed and curriculum-attuned methods, then we would support that. * In the end, we would maintain our role as the neutral community watering hole, the place and means by which the projects share with each other. * Our role would be more like wholesalers than retailers -- member orgs would be responsible for the retailing, with the group's support as long as they still offer free and open sources in education. In other words, if Schoolforge were ever to get more formal, it would host conferences at which all FLOSS for education projects would be welcome. This was written quickly, but I hope relevantly. Looking forward to your thoughts. Best wishes, David Bucknell On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Casey Adams <jcaseyadams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:One thing on this site that jumped out at me that I think would really be appropriate for this list: getting our list members to unite behind a common cause. On this list, we all seem to discuss ideas, send things we think might be of interest, etc., but we do not seem to be taking any compelling action steps. It seems if the entire population of this list got behind a good open source thing for schools and pushed together we could achieve some real change. Maybe we could as a group nominate and agree upon 1-3 open source projects that have real potential for education, help publicize it, help marshal resources, contribute help ourselves and really make some progress with one of these projects. We should all think about where open source can help most and then move together as a group. Just an idea, but one I think has real merit. Thanks. Casey Adams Phone: 205.612.5489 Fax: 717.326.3543. On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:I don't know how many of you are familiar with this: http://www.dosomething.org/ I think it should be possible to make some FLOSS projects that would work well with Do-Something's approach.... Joel-- -- http://intknowledge.com For Schools: http://ischoolnet.org For Teachers: http://flossed.org For You: Hosting, Design and Development: http://www.web4you.in.th New location: (Map: http://ischoolnet.org/map) NEW Mailing Address: PO Box 90, Suthisan Post Office International Knowledge Networks, Co., Ltd. Din Daeng, Bangkok 10321 Thailand +66(0)84 329 1183 (cell); +66(0)2 693 8144 (Don't dial the zero (0) outside of Thailand.