Re: [seul-edu] Managing the coalition--membership

[Harry McGregor <micros@azstarnet.com>]

I hate to put any presure on this... LinuxWorldExpo wants my presentation
to be emailed to them sometime tomorow, for the show CDrom.  I would like
to put in a slide or two about the coalition that is in the formation,
also I would like to add it little bits from RedHat and Mandrake, and
Debian, etc about their stance on Linux in K12 education.

		Harry

On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Doug Loss wrote:

> We've got some increasingly concrete ideas about what the coalition
> should do and what it should look like, but we haven't yet talked
> about its day-to-day management.  That's what I'm going to do now.
> These are my ideas, not my dictat, so I'm not going to couch
> everything in "I think" and "I believe."  Just assume that those
> words are in every paragraph, and feel free to discuss and disagree
> with any point I make.
>
> First thing: who gets to be a member of the coalition?  Membership
> should be by groups, not by individuals.  Individuals can, and ought
> to be, members of one or more of the groups in the coalition, but
> not members of the coalition itself.  The coalition doesn't do much
> of the actual work of promoting free resources in education.  It
> just provides a unified face to the various groups for the outside
> world to see, and gives them an easy means of communicating among
> themselves.  Individuals should be where the work is, in the member
> groups.
>
> What are the criteria for membership?  A member group must be
> furthering the advancement of free resources into the educational
> field in some way.  That could be by providing educational software
> that runs on Linux, providing discussion fora for educators and
> techies on using free software and other resources in the schools,
> providing documentation on using such resources, contracting support
> services for such resources, etc.  We should have a broad definition
> of this, but not bend over backward to make every group that might
> conceivably want to join fit in.  For example, if some project
> writing a first-person shooter game for Linux wanted to join the
> coalition on the idea that some students might enjoy playing the
> game in a school computer lab, I'd say they haven't met the
> requirement.
>
> A qualifying group would agree to post an agreed-upon logo and the
> text, "A member of the Schoolforge coalition" prominently on it's
> website and promotional literature.  Again, we should interpret this
> broadly rather than have hard and fast requirements for a specific
> size and position on a site's front page.  It would also agree to
> post a press release to Linux PR or the equivalent announcing its
> joining the coalition.
>
> Along with this each group will post a list of links to the major
> coalition areas on its website, in some non-obscure area.  This
> could be on the front page, or on some linked page, or could be just
> a front page link to the coalition website.
>
> 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 X months, where X is a number agreed on
> by the coalition (I'd think 3-6).  Groups not meeting that
> requirement would be declared inactive members, with no vote in
> coalition management (I'll get to that later) until they do begin
> updating things again.  After a similar period as inactive members,
> groups would be removed from the coalition.
>
> --
> Doug Loss                 Always do right.  This
> Data Network Coordinator  will gratify some people
> Bloomsburg University     and astonish the rest.
> dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain
>
>

--
Harry McGregor, CEO, Co-Founder
Hmcgregor@osef.org, (520) 661-7875 (CELL)
Open Source Education Foundation, http://www.osef.org