[seul-edu] Schoolforge announcement deadline

["Doug Loss" <drloss@suscom.net>]

I hope everyone had enjoyable holidays.  It's coming up on time for us to
announce Schoolforge to the world.  I'd like to make this announcement in
one week, on January 8.  That will require us to finish up our initial
announcement press release, get our website in an acceptable form for the
general public, put our "bylaws" in place (the membership requirements and
responsibilities), and set up the communication methods we want to have
initially available for people coming to us after the announcement.

William Abernathy is currently working on the press release; I'm sure that
will be ready by the 8th.  By the way, William is in the San Francisco area
and is interested in finding some educational group or free software project
out there that he can help out on.  I suspect he wouldn't be averse to
employment leads for technical writers, either.

Felipe Bergo, Les Richardson, Roger Dingledine, and David Bucknell are
working on the website; I expect they'll  have it ready to go by the 8th. 
If for some reason they need more time, we could slip our announcement till
the 15th, but no later.  And I really wouldn't like to see it slip that far,
either.

I'll work on massaging our membership discussions into an operating
procedures document.  I don't think there'll be any problem having that done
by the 8th.  I'll try to get it done quickly and post it for your perusal
before then.

We need to talk about what communications channels we want to have set up
initially.  It's clear to me that we can't have the primary Schoolforge
discussion list be seul-edu.  We need a mailing list like
sf-general@schoolforge.net, or something similar.  The primary list can't be
tied to a particular member project.  Even if we only set that one list up,
that would probably suffice for the initial period.  However, mailing lists
are easy to create.  Let's talk about what (small handfull) of lists we
ought to have available at the initial unveiling of Schoolforge.  We should
also talk about weblogs, wikis, newsgroups, etc. for this sort of thing, but
in the short period left I think mailing lists are our best way to go.

One more thing.  Everyone on this list--if you have any contacts with news
media, whether Linux-related, education-related, or general mainstream,
please assemble them.  If you can send email contacts to William Abernathy
<william@inch.com> and me, that would be helpful.  Even more helpful would
be if you could send them a copy of the press release (which William will
post here before sending it off) yourself.  These things tend to get more
consideration if coming from a known source.  They may get more notice also
if they're received from multiple sources at the same time, so don't worry
that someone else may send the press release to your contacts.  We'll try to
put the press release into a nicely printable form (PDF?) too, so you can
print out copies and snail-mail or fax them to people.  And one final
request--does anyone know of any method that would allow us to fax the press
release to numbers across the US (and the world, if possible) for little to
no cost?  Such a thing would greatly increase the reach of our initial
public announcement.

Doug Loss
dloss@seul.org