To my knowledge, there is a church school ICT co-ordinator (i.e. all Maltese Church schools). Im not sure if it is still the same person, but it used to be the ICT teacher at my old secondary school. That would mean only having to convince one person and leaving it up to him/her to convince the rest.
Goals like switching over Government computers, School computers, steering away from ECDL, etc are all great goals, but will undoubtably be met with great resistance. Not only by the users who will have to learn a new system, but far more so by people who have a stake in the current situation. ECDL is certainly the cash cow of many computer learning schools, while the government switching over to linux will certainly be met by resistance, not least by MS themselves, as they seem to be showing increased action against Linux (take the appearence of cheap XP on educational laptops like OLPC). Building up something like that would require a solid foundation. One part of that foundation is having students at Uni and Mcast comfortable with the idea of linux. Accomplishing this would help ensure that Malta would be able to deal with the change from a HR point of view. Also, students already used to IT would(should) be far more open to the change than Mr Average Joe who would wonder if he can still access hi5 from Linux. Also, I wonder, would it be a good idea to try and work with computer suppliers with regards to linux too. Perhaps someone might be willing to put together and sell Linux friendly boxes (similar to what Ubuntu did with dell but on a local scale) .A lot of people will just leave things as they are as long as they work. Reasonably cheap hardware, with a funky installation of linux on demonstration in the showroom is likely to encourage people to buy linux pcs, and just leave things like that (idea is similar to what many supermarkets are doing abroad (take WallMart and gOS)) In anycase, this post is probably long enough for this time at night, but the possibilities are endless and worth looking into. Seb
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