On 03/12/2007, at 7:58 PM, Ian Lynch wrote:
On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 17:45 +1100, Jonathon Coombes wrote:
We need to come up with a campaign aimed at an 18 - 24 yr old
demographic
with best punch for a limited budget.
The idea is to be ready with a pitch when or if further funds become
available.in the next quarter.
I agree with Graham in regards to getting in on the new school year.
One particular focus for Australia in particular is based on a new
government coming in and putting forward new education policies for
the coming years. A number of open source groups are combining their
focus on this potential market at the moment, both at the government
level and at the school level. It is currently aimed at primary and
high school level,
The advantage of doing this is that if you hit an element of
mainstream
IT education and have a compelling argument to get it into the
curriculum it will affect every person in the target group. FE and HE
are strategically more difficult because the courses are specialist
and
fragmented into different departments. If you target eg computer
science, it's a very much smaller number of people than the 5-16
school
population.
Agreed, but in these levels the computers are not used just for
computer science, but also maths, spelling, art etc. This means that
you have to have a solution to address the bigger area.
I am unaware of a push toward the university
market, but I am sure it will be complemented nicely with the overall
campaign direction.
Of course if you hit all 16 year olds, in a couple of years they
will all be at university.
Of course this is true, but unfortunately they don't decide what
software the university uses or teaches. If they are smart enough,
they can work within the confines e.g. OOo vs MS Office documents
etc, but if the university wants to teach MS Visual Basic, then no
matter how many Linux stations they use, they cannot convince the
university of its value.
I think if we can provide an environment that works on both Linux and
Windows (and Mac as well) then the schools will soon realise that
they don't need to be forced into one operating system. This can be
done now for a range of applications as seen in the OpenCD project
which provides many applications that work across the platforms and
are suitable for school use. The added advantage FLOSS provides is
that you can give the applications to the students for use at home,
for their parents to use, their churches etc. Rather than being
forced to use what the students have at home.
Regards
Jonathon
--------------------------
Jonathon Coombes
OOo Knowledgebase:- http://mindmeld.cybersite.com.au
http://www.cybersite.com.au
http://www.training4linux.com
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