In two weeks, there will be a Jabber meeting about the activities of FSFE’s Edu-Team. We will ask for opinions on Free Software and education and the future of the edu team. Got any ideas?
Well, I thought it might help if I post some of my thoughts beforehand to discuss, even if you don’t participate at the jabber meeting 😉
Over the last few years; I met so many people interested in the subject, that I find it odd that the mailing list for edu activities in Europe is so low traffic. There are probably a million reasons for this, but maybe one of them is, that there is so much to do; that it’s hard to find a point to start with. Today, I want to tackle this.
I think we might get more people involved by defining and providing specific tasks. A HowTo in helping the edu-team so to speak. I can also imagine something like the recent pdfreaders campaign where anybody can do “something” within 2 minutes of her/his time.
Orientation needed? compass rose (public domain)
To get a better overview of what could be done, I categorized the whole matter by stakeholders, inspired by Anne Østergaard’s presentation:
- pupils / students
- parents
- teachers / professors
- administration
- polititians
- developer / technicians / maintainers
- advocats / allies / helpers
I am planing to fill the wiki pages little by little, but I am certainly happy for any contribution you can make! My goal is to make it easier for volunteers to help. The first 6 category pages have the following structure:
- Organisations or individuals that might help in this group. The goal is to join forces, not to launch another inactive organisation
- already existing projects
- communication platforms, media for this group. Volunteers can join there, monitor forums, follow discussions and jump in when it comes to software
- argumentation and possible group specific concerns/pejudices that need to be tackled. A help for volunteers how to prepare for discussions
- how can a member of this group help us. This section is mostly overlapping with the “advocates howto”
- advocacy material for this group, like presentations, flyers, audio, video
- everything else that might fit
So, if you have anything to add, please plunge right in!
It’s clear that the edu-team doesn’t have the resources to cover everything. My goal is to find organisations that are already active in the various fields and connect them if applicable.
For me, our (FSFE edu-team) target stakeholders are activists and polititians.
Activists should find in us a competent resource to find what’s currently going on and what projects exist, so they can chose where to help without wasting their time researching for the options.
In order to become such a resource, we need to get the information first. Please post anything in regards to FS in education to the edu-eu mailing list or the OFSET group at identi.ca!