On July 28, 2002 07:19 pm, Ian Anderson wrote:
>
> Shipping a person cross-country is expensive. Until Linus and RMS are
> household names no one is going to gather the crowds to make that
> endeavor worth while. A more useful idea is to prepare presentation
> notes that someone in the area familiar with the topic can use for
> making a presentation. This has the added bonus of creating better
> speakers who can public-relations and PR locally.
I think you're right on there, Ian. This is where I'd like to see CLUE go.
Help the LUGs, maybe even offer to fund and organize provincial meetings
(with input from the LUGs) that might have a chance in hell of getting some
of the bigger names because of the greater size of audiences. If there's
somebody else that does this, who?
> Trying to compete with Microsoft head on is a great way to burn through
> money.
I agree. Forget about trying to be anti-Microsoft. Let's just educate people
about the Linux alternative. Besides, even Microsoft is starting to back off
of the FUD now that they see it's not as effective as they had hoped. Except
for a small minority, politics just plain turns people off and we want to
turn people on.
> > - Lobbyists who will meet and keep contact with MPs (and MPPs and MLAs
> > etc.) charged with technical issues, be it Ministers or Deputy Ministers
> > or Shadow Ministers or committee chairs or relevant committees of
> > political parties or whatever;
>
> This should be done at the local level. All MPs should be lobbied by
> their constituents.
This is one area in where CLUE can help, too. Talk to the LUGs or other
organizations that have already done this and find out what is most effective
to *say* to the local poliltical officials. The best way to get something on
somebody else's agenda is to get it to be able to show how it fits in their
agenda. With some retraining of users and having experienced technical staff,
Linux is cheaper and most governments are really big on cutting costs. We
need ROIs and TCOs that show that. Why have each LUG have to reseach all that
information themselves when somebody like CLUE can look into it once and
provide it for LUGs. The biggest thing CLUE can do, I think, is to open up
the lines of communications between LUGs.
> Why are you so interested in corporate sponsorship? Open source is
> about sharing ideas and information, not about making money. You may
> think that providing information to people is trivial, but it is why
> people use computers and the Internet. You don't impress someone by
> telling them something they know, you impress them by telling them
> something new. And the only way to find out new information is to
> communicate with other people, and making that as easy as possible.
Agreed. I don't think corporate sponsorship is that big of a deal either. In
any case, it shouldn't be used to define what CLUE should be, otherwise we
are letting our agenda be controlled by commercial concerns. Funding sources
shouldn't even be considered until we've decided what CLUE stands for.
--
Jason Wallwork
A new dramatist of the absurd
Has a voice that will shortly be heard.
I learn from my spies
He's about to devise
An unprintable three-letter word.
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