Andrew Fife wrote:
Daniel Howard wrote:I'd love for this group to explore the idea of how we can more determinately promote FOSS for schools. Our competition uses advertising, wining and dining, FUD, and incentives to achieve their goals; what can we do in defense besides FUD?How about getting involved with the Ubuntu installfest for schools on March 1st? Free computers are hard to turn down. http://www.untangle.com/installfest
Funny you should mention that...I just started a new Care of the Earth team at my church called "Computers for the Community." I've already garnered over 25 church volunteers to do the refurbishing, and I'm making a proposal to several groups here in Atlanta as well as specific companies to get donated PCs. While we'll likely do a lot of PCs using Ubuntu, I'm including PuppyLinux and K12LTSP in our bag of distros to use so that we can make use of even the oldest donated PCs. I'm told I may tap into hundreds of donated PCs on a regular basis...
Interestingly, since Atlanta Public Schools is rolling out new Linux thin clients to schools as fast as they can, they likely won't want the donated PCs in the schools. And they recently gave a new laptop to every teacher in the city as well. Instead, I'm planning to target the teacher's aides at every school in Atlanta. Teacher's aides, or paraprofessionals, make so little salary that most of them cannot afford a home computer, yet they are expected to be computer savvy when helping teach our kids. So I thought, what better way to use donated PCs for education if you can't put them in the schools themselves?
But I'm not sure this will be sexy enough to get the kind of airplay we're discussing in this thread. I like the Tux float idea myself...
Daniel -- Daniel Howard President and CEO Georgia Open Source Education Foundation