Hello, I proposed organizing a student essay competition on Free Software and Open Standards topics.
The original letter to the DFD mailing list: > I would like to propose organizing an essay competition for European > high school students on Free Software and Open Standards issues. This > would have several benefits: it would encourage people to think about > Free Software and Open Standards; it would expose more young people to > the issues of Free Software and Open Standards (I am of the opinion > that educational institutions would rather advertise a student essay > competition than distribute, say, FSFE leaflets); it would popularize > Free Software; we would probably get new good texts to promote Open > Standards and Free Software; if we announced the winners on the DFD > using an Open Standard, we would celebrate it in a very suitable > fashion and would further publicize the DFD. > > I am now going to propose some ideas that could be developed into > topics if you agree it is a good idea. > -> What am I going to do on the DFD to advance Open Standards and > promote Free Software?/What would my ideal DFD experience be? > -> What should be done to promote Open Standards? > -> What am I going to do to ensure that my government will use open > document formats? > -> Open standards vs proprietary specifications > > Should you agree that such an activity would be nice, we would have to > act pretty fast. If we wanted to announce the winners on the DFD, the > deadline for sending essays would have to be the 14th of March at the > latest and we would probably want to give people at least a month to > think and write. We would probably have to have our volunteers contact > the national ministries of education and media at least another week > in advance. Which means, that should we agree to do this, we would > have to have everything decided by the 7th of February. Following deliberation on the df-coordination@, we have come to the agreement that it would be better to organize a blog post competition and we should stick to a small number of countries (like 3) this year due tto time constraints. Thus, as I would be able to coordinate and publicize this in Estonia, I am looking for volunteers who would be willing to run it in two additional countries. Furthermore, prize ideas would be welcome. > I think that as we want to popularize Free Software and Open > Standards, the prizes could be somehow related to the FSFE. The prizes > should be decided based on whether we want to primarily appeal to > students who already have an inclination for Free Software or students > who do not. If we want to encourage people who have an affinity for > Free Software to get active, then we could offer something from the > FSFE shop, a FSFE Fellowship, or a Free Software book, etc... If we > want to appeal to more students, we would probably have to offer > monetary rewards or hardware. I am not sure which group we should > target, thus prize ideas and suggestions would be welcome from other > interlocutors. Also, any offers to participate in a jury to grade the entries would also be appreciated. Faithfully, -- Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild <[email protected]> <https://wiki.fsfe.org/Fellows/repentinus> <http://blogs.fsfe.org/repentinus/> _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
