Hi, Paul,
About half of our state funding has been awarded through
competitive grants..that is, the state agency has gone out and
said..."we're going to spend XXX dollars on YYY thing... please
write a proposal on how you would spend these dollars if received."
Are these proposals or spending guidelines available for VAGUE
members to read, comment upon, develop or extend?
Once awarded, my assumption is that the grant application is available
in the public domain either as an abstract or full text, which is the
case with many federal grants. That said...I haven't looked on any of
the state's web sites to see where...
Developing is a collaborative process. We've had help from Joe Golden
of Green Mt. Linux in formulating these grants....he has been part of
the vtSDA Outreach Committee. We'd welcome others on the committee...
which meets usually the 2nd Tuesday of the month at VCET (Farrell
Hall, 210 Colchester Avenue Burlington).
and an initiative to rewrite the entry-level curriculum for
computer applications which is offered to high-school freshmen.
Is there any FOSS involved in this curriculum? Just Today, I asked
one of the products of the Vermont Tech Educational system if when
they exclusively taught her Microsoft Office skills had they taught
her "mail merge". She said "no". I think presenting possible
information technology curricula to VAGUE would be to everyone's
benefit.
Our current pilot project involves the use of ALICE as a programming
language/environment, which is free.
The mail-merge question comes up all the time....but I would like to
apply for funding to design a study which will determine the actual
number of mail-merges performed by the citizens of our fair state,
within a set period of time. My hypothesis is that the actual number
is very low....say... 20 mail-merges per month. If so, should the
mail merge skill be one of those upon which the fitness of a
curriculum is judged?
The other half of our state funding has come from haranguing our
legislators, writing to our newspapers, traveling to Montpelier,
and generally attempting to make our case that software has a
potential for economic benefit several times the order of magnitude
as "legacy" industries such as tourism and maple syrup, which,
although part of the Vermont mind-set, do not as a rule contribute
high-paying jobs or much in the way of added monetary value by
comparison.
Why go after State money?
One thing I've been interested in exploiting is nonwithstanding the
fact that the government coerces its citizens into paying taxes, the
same government will actually refund this money...often in
disproportionate amounts, to those of its citizens who ask nicely.
(As an aside, this principal was first revealed to me in what I
consider a classic of the open source canon, "The Incredible Secret
Money Machine" by Don Lancaster... a terrific book that still is very
relevant thirty years or so after its first appearance.)
But, even more importantly, when applying for grants, one always likes
to find two things:
1. a willing donor
2. who has money.
and the state agencies mentioned above fit that happy category at
least for that last fiscal year. Whether that continues in the future
is an open question and we are on the lookout for alternative
funding. Also as part of our original proposal, we asserted that
vtSDA would be self-funding after X years (I can't remember...it may
have been 3 or 5).
Also, I think (but am not sure), that some of the funding that we've
gotten from the state is actually federal money.
Were foundations or business grants considered?
They were and are. We have applied for and been rejected by a program
from the National Science Foundation. Our rejection came with several
suggestions for resubmission, and we anticipate resubmitting once the
program is announced again, hopefully in January. This is for their
ITEST program (Innovation in Teaching Science and Technology) and is
$1.3 million over three years.
It was the first 1/4 of the research plan of this ITEST grant which we
turned around and used in our most recent state Career Enhancement
application...and we were grateful that they picked it up so we could
push the program along. It is now chugging along nicely; CVU is
participating in the pilot.
>>business grants...
I know someone else in the organization is applying to a grant from
Oracle to help in the brain barn project. My own take is that the
businesses tend to be more proprietary, and have funny requirements
(like using Oracle software with the project). I just haven't had
much luck (personally) with business grants. Its like venture
capital....they want a piece of you.
The state funding that we have received is a tiny fraction of what
the state puts into things like agriculture and tourism. We'd like
to think it was a good investment, and that we are spending our
taxes wisely in promoting this business segment...one of three top
projected areas of growth in the U.S.
Yet once you involve taxpayers, suddenly you really need to become
inclusive of all the IT interests in the state. State money comes
with this serious consequence.
We're a pretty big tent, and all of these grant applications have six
or more collaborators who contribute input, letters of support, and
matching funds. I think one reason the partnership has worked well is
that we've worked from the grassroots upward, rather than attempted to
impose something designed by the ''gummint'.
More about selling. Can the development of Open Source software
become a cottage industry in Vermont with a state sanctioned
closed source monopoly product orientation that extends into state
sponsored trade associations?
Indeed you have done an excellent job of sales, and we are all
agree that the ideal of a cottage industry is the goal. Hell I even
have a cottage here in Barre. I even believe that we can see the
role of Open Source. That said, the sad thing about the Champlain
College Media facility opening I attended was I counted the number
of systems running FOSS systems.
That number was Zero.
I noticed the same thing... I was glad at least that they had some Macs.
The state isn't "sanctioning" anything...nor do the requests for grant
proposals have any language that restricts programming languages or
operating systems in any way. Choice of language or platform is not a
criterion when the proposals are evaluated.
Actually, I think we've already got a cottage industry, with over 250
Vermont companies producing software. vtSDA would like to set our
sights to build out software development as a major player in the
Vermont economy, with green technologies and other scientific and
technical niches as well.
One final story,
Ten years ago I was consulting for a multi-national education non-
profit, and I discussed with the systems manager the notion of using
open source...in particular I was talking about replacing their
Windows 2000/NT servers, with Linux. This would have been a
logistical wrench, not least because they had several client/server
applications that used SQL-Server as the back end. His point was that
as an educational institution, they got such good discounts on any
proprietary software that the amount spent on the software was a
miniscule percentage of their IT budget. So, there was no economic
benefit, and certainly no performance benefit that justified such a
change.
Later that year I was doing an inventory of their machines at one of
the european sites and couldn't find the terminal server box. Turns
out this was a Linux box running VMC or something and it had been
bricked up in a wall during a recent renovation, and been merrily
running, unseen, for several months.
So, the moral for me was, use what works. At the time I actually got
them to go from running four O/S's in the organization to two,
Windows, and the aforementioned Linux. We dumped Macs in one site,
and Novell in another, and my advice to subsequent clients was to run
one and only one OS in the organization.
I'm happy to say that they didn't all run Windows.
Nice to see you at the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Jam.
--- Larry
