Here is my answer to that mail. Maybe there are some additional thoughts about how to present Sage to a wider audience? Explaining others what Sage is about? Exchange of Sage knowledge and experience, and so on. Features alone don't help to pursue our mission ;)
> - Can you provide a few key points as to why Sage products are > valuable to Educational Institutions implementing Open Source > technology? First, I think we have to boil everything down to the level of individual parts. For example, "educational institution" is a bit too broad. Sage (from it's historic background) is an advanced pure maths system. It's was not designed to suit the needs of "lower" educational institutions besides universities. Although, there is progress towards these areas, too. Maybe we should start the other way round: Let's think about the key features Sage has to offer to fit a certain market. Then, we could break it down how well Sage fits and do advertising based on that? Also, there will always be a gap between a commercial closed source system and Sage due to it's nature of development, the attitude of the community and the circumstances how development works. All these factors contribute how the final product actually manifests! I think this should be emphasized in some way, that this is something "positive". Enabling the consumer to give feedback, actually contribute to the product in many ways (documentation+online tutorials, sharing knowledge [peer to peer help], code, ...) and probably following the development process very closely. You know, there is also some psychology behind that, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat means, that if everybody behaves cooperatively, everyone gains the most. It's a different mindset and therefore I think not so easy to do 1:1 the same marketing for Sage as you would do for Maple. One example we could look into (as a comparison and source of inspiration) are other open source eLearning tools. There are closed source products and open source products. Open source tools that come to my mind are http://moodle.org/ http://dotlrn.org/ [that one is interesting, because it actually needs development power to make it work, consists of many modules] http://www.claroline.net/ Maybe we could learn something from them since they are also used at universities and colleges, compete with commercial software and distribute their product at zero license costs. A follow up question could be if Sage could be integrated in one of those systems. Theoretically yes, but practically no since there is no example I know of. > - In high level terms, how do Sage's software products benefit from > running on Sun's Open Source infrastructure? No idea, one real benefit could be, if Sun offers something besides the Sage software in addition. For example, installation help, help with updating, a previously tested package that doesn't need much work by the admin. Since Sage also runs on other hardware platforms, the real plus could be any such service. Besides that, maybe it's simply scalability and/or the sandboxing inside virtual environments on a server. But I don't have any information about that... > - Are there specific Sage products that should be highlighted in an > Open Source for Education campaign? If so, which ones and why? As above, depends on the education institution. The main points are: * could run on a central server, access via the web * also, could run on your local computer with zero license fees * product could be easily designed/adopted/extended to work well with special services of the education institution. I.e. a custom logo and design, links to internal resources (intraweb, elearning integration), ... * exchange of worksheets: Each notebook shows worksheets. They can be used to distribute notes from the teacher to all students, students can exchange among them or send works to the teacher. It's basically just a file that contains all the maths + the history of modifications. Exchange works cross platform. * fast development with short cycles: that's a two-fold argument. could be bad and good. I think it's mainly good, because new features and bugfixes are fixed in a short time (if there is a fix *g*) -- also, by using a central server, all users can be updated much faster and all use the same version at the same time. though, it's important to focus on backwards compatibility. i.e. that a months old worksheet still loads in sage and so on. minor changes in behavior are ok, you also have the same with all the commercial systems. * Another point is the future prove of investments: ** sage is based on python and the interface language for all interactions with sage are python (with a preparser, but it's as good as python) -- so, the investment in learning how to interact with sage is also an investment in learning python (a widely used general purpose programming language). one argument could go this way: computers are more and more important in daily life, it's a great addition to learn a programming language. by learning python in sage, you are not limited to sage only and you could use that also for other projects. [all other commercial maths software require you to learn their specific programming language that you cannot use anywhere else] ** open source products aren't closed down if the company is bought (that was the case with blackboard vs. webCT vista in the area of commercial eLearning platforms) -> less probability that your resources are suddenly useless. ** investment in manpower. consider the case an institute hires a developer to extend sage in exactly the way they want it [compare with dotLRN above], this new code could be kept secret unless the modified software is distributed or (much favored) it could be adopted by the actual sage project and live there "forever". *** this also holds true for special purpose libraries that are written by smaller research groups. one example i know from my university is, that they have written their own library for tensor calculations in mathematica. now, after years of discount, mathematica charges much more money and the university is no longer able to afford the software. therefore, the library is useless. once again, no problem of any kind like this with sage! > - Do you have any customers in Education currently using Sun/Sage open > source technology that could be referenced in these materials? > don't know . . . Maybe, I should also think about similar questions :) Probably, the biggest resistance in adopting Sage is, that a decider in an institution has not heard about Sage before. He trusts a name that he has already heard before or a software that is already running. I think the best strategy is a step-by-step approach. Exchanging the whole software at once, confusing everybody and breaking everything will end up in a disaster. An interesting point is, that, besides hardware and some manpower, there are no additional costs in providing two systems at the same time. If it is very easy to deploy Sage in some kind of test installation, with user account management and data storage, the resistance might be much lower. Then, based on that, there could be services, a broader deployment later on and so on. So, one of the sage-devel engineering directions could be to provide a full system for easy installation. I think we are already pretty far, but I also mean, documentation, list of tested hardware, assistance, etc. Then, there will also be a group of "early adopters" using the system. They act as local peers for Sage knowledge and later on it might behave like a snowball, that one member of a group convinces all colleagues to use it, too. This kind of knowledge could be transfered by seminars for teachers. It should be easy to filter those who are really interested by some kind of entrance fee [remember: often someone thinks it has no value if it is for free!!!] or email registration. If they like Sage they will use it and talk with others about it. (Maybe this needs some additional kind of force to convince them to use Sage, too, but that depends on local politics and the motivation of the teachers) We should also think about the inverse of your questions, especially something like: "What are the reasons for XY to *not* adopt Sage?" * they already have a system, invested money for the next years -> counter argument: what then, pay even more? will the company still exist? they can still install sage in parallel. * sage doesn't fit their needs -> see my idea about listing the requirements for each type of institution. maybe we come up with some points we have to implement in sage that are easy to do but missing because we simply don't see them. actual talking with institutions might help, providing immediately feedback and iterating the software to the next level. This requires a solid feedback from the user, funneled through marketing and others (?) to the developers. * majority of students don't speak english -> all functions and references are english only and that won't change. on the other hand, maths internationally is english only and it might even help to learn english in such a domain... [you often learn something best if you actually do something different] * the fear that sage is just a hype and might turn out to be dead in a year, blow up to be a huge mess, crapware, ... counter arguments are the history, the details of how we develop the software (using a "scientific review" model), the fact that key parts of sage can be exchanged [if the development behind a component we use turns out to die or something like that] - we already did that! Ok, thanks for reading, any additional thoughts are welcome. greetings Harald --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
