[seul-edu] Fwd: ANN: Digikata LLC wins Open Source SBIR grant

[Doug Loss <drloss@home.com>]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

From: alan@digikata.com
To: seul-edu@seul.org
Subject: ANN: Digikata LLC wins Open Source SBIR grant

On September 4, 2001, Digikata LLC was awarded a Phase I, Small
Business Innovation Research grant from the US Department of
Education.  Digikata proposed that the educational sector could
greatly benefit from the development of a low-cost server applicance
based on Open Source technologies and Open Source processes. Over the
next six months, the Phase I goals for my company are:

1) Develop a critera by which Digikata and schools can evaluate the
   utility of open source components. Provide a survey of components
   using this criteria.

2) Develop a prototype server applicance and deploy it in two
   "template" environments. Two organizations within the Pomona
   Unified School district have agreed to be the template
   environments. Because education has such a wide variety of needs,
   the Phase I prototype will be tuned to the needs of these
   environments. However, see 3 below.

3) Engage the Open Source community by soliciting input regarding 1
   and 2. In addition, make availiable downloads or CD's of the
   protoype software to expand testing (and hopefully feature set)
   beyond the two template environments.

I was helped on the proposal by Doug Loss, Harry MacGregor, and Bill
Ries-Knight, regulars on this list who proofread and sanity checked
 my writing. (Thanks guys!) Right now, I'd love to hear from anyone
 who might be interested in any of the above.  In the near future, I
 hope to excerpt and release parts of the proposal and developing
 evaluation criteria for schools. Hopefully, a "non-development"
 version of the prototype will be availiable by late November.
 However, I'll also speak with anyone who's interested about early
 development versions of the server.


-- alan

--
Alan Chen
President and Lead Developer
Digikata LLC
(909)576-5489, alan@digikata.com

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