Hi Vickram, On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Vickram Crishna <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Indranil Das Gupta <[email protected]> > wrote:
[snipped] >> >> So now we (the members of the FOSS community) have been called upon to >> "prove" that alternative CBT development is possible using FOSS. > > Right. With due respect to Mr Sen's position, I trust he has not > misunderstood the 'F' in FOSS. > He needs to put out a tender asking for bids to create a CBT, specifying 1. > No use of unpaid commercial tools (so no use of tools supplied cheap for > 'educational purposes' - they call that pirated); 2. level playing field by > supplying bidders with all supplementary materials and documentation in open > standard formats; 3. based on his (or rather, his department's) prior > experience with CBT development, a minimum floor price not less than the > last CBT for which they paid, or if for some reason that was justifiably on > the high side, the average of the last 3 CBTs. I am sure there will be many > FOSS bidders (and a few non-FOSS players too, as long as there's a party in > the offing) ready to join hands with him, enthusiastically. Er... I think you lost me here. I mean what you wrote above about tendering makes sense, but *where* did the topic of tendering come into the picture to begin with? Perhaps, my last post wasn't clear enough. FWIW. if you refer to my first post [1] here on this topic, you will see the reference to "IOTA Job ad" [2] where they were looking for hiring people to employ as internal resources to develop the CBTs. The original job ad asked for people with skills in prop. s/w. This is where the first intervention happened and a policy decision was taken by the Minister In-Charge IT (Prof Debesh Das) to changeover to FOSS tools. At this juncture, it was necessary to create a production workflow, and Mr Sen, turned to the his most capable in-house resource in the matter, who happened to be an expert on prop multimedia authoring s/w only. As a result, the expert came back with his observations which were part of the discussions so far. Now, due to several persons' lobbying and due to the email replies on this list and others, IOTA is willing to accept that it may be possible to do the same work without using prop. tools. Mr. Sen's email is an open and frank admission of the fact they need to be shown by the FOSS community members how to do the job in-house using FOSS tools. He's asking for help to develop a short (say 5 -10 min) CBTs that will be a proof-of-concept. It is now no longer a question of finding an exact drop-in replacement for closed tools, rather for them to learn how to do it using FOSS tools. [1] http://lists.fosscom.in/pipermail/network-fosscom.in/2010-March/002263.html [2] http://indradg.randomink.org/blog/archives/150 cheers -idg > -- > Vickram > http://communicall.wordpress.com -- Indranil Das Gupta Phone : +91-98300-20971 Blog : http://indradg.randomink.org/blog IRC : indradg on irc://irc.freenode.net Twitter : indradg -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Please exchange editable Office documents only in ODF Format. No other format is acceptable. Support Open Standards. To get a free editor supporting ODF, please visit http://www.openoffice.org/ _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
