[seul-edu] Draft letter of invitation for Schoolforge

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

This is a first draft of a letter of invitation to be sent to all
prospective members of the Schoolforge coalition.  It would be nice to
get as many members as possible in the initial announcement, so we can
show ourselves to be a broad-based coalition rather than just a few
groups seeming to want to assume the mantle of "Linux in education." 
Please critique it.

Hello.  We know that you are working at furthering the use of Linux and
free software in general [this may be replaced by "free resources" in
the letter to non-software or advocacy projects such as open lesson
plans, etc.].  We are members of groups with similar goals.  Up until
now all of our individual projects have suffered from low visibility and
the tendency to repeat work that others were already doing or had
already done.

When Red Hat Software made a counter-proposal to Microsoft's offer of
settling an antitrust lawsuit by giving US$1 Billion to US schools, we
were galvanized to try to take advantage of the sudden publicity this
gave the use of free software in education.

We started planning for a coalition of groups that were all working to
make free software and resources more widely used in education.  You'll
find a description of this coalition (called Schoolforge) below [insert
David Bucknell's mission statement below].  We currently have numerous
members, including Open Source Schools, SEUL/edu, and RedHat [I mention
only these three because they probably have the highest name recognition
at the moment].  We'd like to invite you to join the coalition and help
us further our shared goals of providing free resources to our schools. 
To join Schoolforge, just reply to this message with the name of your
group and the contact person.  We'll add you to the list.  If you'd like
to take part in the discussions and work of forming Schoolforge, go to
http://www.seul.org/edu/ and join the mailing list.  That's where all
the organizational work is taking place.  We hope to welcome you on
board!

-- 
Doug Loss          As long as I have you there is just
drloss@suscom.net  one other thing I'll always need--
(570) 326-3987     tremendous self control.
                          Ashleigh Brilliant