[ALLIES] Re: [Lias] An opportunity to grab!

[Janet Hawtin]

<imho - this is all just my thoughts others may think very differently>

It could be an interesting article to follow up with the fact that
open source options are out there but are not able to help the schools.
And in some cases are being actively shut down for MS.
But we need to be careful. I think it would be a good idea for us to use 
this time prior to demand for open source edu to figure out what we 
actually do want to contribute.

What do we have to offer which is specifically of interest to the 
schools and teachers in each area. Donna's work is chipping away at this 
facet. We could easily do more about understanding how technology 
interacts with teaching in a real school, both ideally and really.

What do we as a community or industry have real capacity to support and 
deliver.

It would be a shame to get a good response from schools then not have 
enough trainers and system support folk who can work within the edu 
sector on an ongoing basis.

I can see that it is tricky to start small given the MS lockdown.
If we start tackling the big issue lets get a bit more public with each 
other about capacity and kinds of things we can do so that we do not 
promise a scale of industry which is less or more than what is actually 
possible.

Could we have some kind of geographic map about what kinds of edu 
support we have in which geographic areas? Perhaps this exists and I'm 
not aware. eg. a blue dot is a lug, a yellow dot is a systems support 
team/company, a green dot is computer recycling, a red dot could be 
school edu open source folk, a purple dot could be community edu 
workers. Size of the dot might indicate 1FTE+

I can probably help on the mapping but if we do this AU wide this
could perhaps be a standard way of mapping an area and different folk 
can build up their local regions?

</imho>

Janet