On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 14:23 -0500, Louis Suarez-Potts wrote: > Hi, > On 2006-03-11, at 11:31 , Daniel Carrera wrote: > > > Louis Suarez-Potts wrote: > >> Hm. This is great news, but I'm curious, as I'm sure others here > >> are, too, about the details.What sort of ideas do you have? I'd > >> be also curious about support--it's the usual issue. > > > > I don't understand your last sentence. What about support and what > > usual issue? > > Oh, whenever public sector (or private, for that matter) wants OOo on > a large scale they ask about support. My experience has been that if > one wants to succeed in getting OOo on the desktops of enterprises > and the like, one has to be able to point to support. So I am always > curious who is offering support or if the issue has come up.
Its not really a problem in this case, Open Source Consortium is a group of companies set up specifically to support FLOSS in government projects. I was elected by OSC and Schoolforge UK to be the interface with BECTA so they know we have the capacity to provide support. We also have the INGOTs to provide certification that is going through QCA (The UK Quango associated with qualifications and the curriculum) to be officially recognised in the Open Quals framework www.openquals.org.uk Once The Learning Machine gets QCA recognition as an Awarding body we can also submit certification such as vocational qualifications for school technicians in migration to Open Source or even qualifications specific to OOo. Countries like New Zealand already have strong links with BECTA and UK curriculum and examination strategies and Graham Lauder in New Zealand is well up with this. Also Manfred Reiter in Germany who used to be the Co-lead of the OOo German project and is well informed on education issues and EU grant applications. Indeed we now have INGOT assessors trained in 18 countries. So we are developing the environment such that when we get a major government shift in the UK it will have a knock on effect in many other countries. So to cut a long story short, if the Gov wants OOo support, from technical training to student certification, we can supply it and we can also point to international network support for it in other countries. Thinking about it a bit more, one thing we could propose is for the Gov. to sponsor whole class teaching materials in Maths for all kids aged 9-14. I estimate that we would need about 300 OOo Impress lessons to cover the whole National Curriculum for maths for this age range. At say £200 per lesson that's £60k. A rounding error on the government's £100m a year input to curriculum on-line. If they insist on ODF format for these lessons it means to access them the schools have to use OOo Impress at this point in time. If these resources have government endorsement most schools will use them and so most will install OOo at least in every classroom. We can offer support through SFUK and OSC. Of course these resources would be Open Source so anyone would be free to translate them to other languages. So I think getting the government endorsement will be more difficult than getting the development funds but certainly not impossible. I will also propose that the Gov. funds development of more web based problem solving resources. Daniel has done some for Otto's club as examples look at http://theingots.org/Ottos_club These puzzles take a couple of days to do so again a relatively small amount of money gets a lot done. If schools have this sort of web content freely available its much easier to sell them a switch to Open Source. That in turn is good for OOo. I'm trying to put this in the context of a bigger picture where we create the environment to make it easy for end users to make the transition. UK government is definitely Open standards friendly, we just have to show them how they can implement policies at not a very great risk to start with. Risk both in terms of the politics and the financial considerations. I liked Ben Horst's suggestions and these too can be provided as options. I think we need to give them costed options with guided recommendations so they can more easily make the decisions. Regards, -- Ian Lynch www.theINGOTs.org www.opendocumentfellowship.org www.schoolforge.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
