Welcome to future home of Freedomware Marketing. The Tux Project is going to be shifting gears a bit. This site is set to become a grass-e-roots website where we can all work together to openly collaborate on promoting the use of Freedomware in our local communities. Whether you are a business owner who uses or offers Freedomware solutions, or an individual enthusiast. You will find that this is the place for you to share your promotional ideas and work together collaboratively in order to make them a reality.
GNU and Tux went to school...
...to talk about Freedomware.
This project has been put on hold until I am able to contact Mike Huffman to see if he would be willing to share copies of his notes and presentations. I will keep you updated as to my progress.
Just recently I read an article over at the free software foundation website titled "Why schools should exclusively use free software." Something like this has been brought up and discussed here on the Tux Project as well( A week of Linux ). The discussion took a few twists and turns. But in the end there are still not any materials that I know of that exist that one could use to approach a school or home school coop should an opportunity suddenly present itself... So as a month long challenge to myself I am going to start working to create a handout, mailers and a talking points sheet. I might even create a digital presentation. I need to know how to use impress anyway. 
It would be great if others would be able to join in. I think that if the materials existed even in a limited way it would be a better than what we have now. The goal? To make it so that one would just need to make some copies of live CD's and OpenCD's that could be handed out. Print up a few handouts and a talking points sheet fill in the blanks on them and the digital presentation if applicable and presto!
This would go a long way towards creating a unified effort that would deliver a consistent message.
I will be attaching each resource I create to this blog post with a document version number and description. I will start the version numbers at 0.0.1. Anyone improving upon what I start should reply to the comment in which the description and attached document are located. Anyone beating me to the punch on any given resource should reply to this uppermost post.
What is needed:
- A guide by which one could use as a reference throughout the process.
- A checklist for what is needed to put together the whole thing.
- A handout that can be passed out to the various people attending the event/meeting.
- Professional mailers that can be printed full color on glossy or black and white on plain print paper.
- A Talking points sheet that ties into the handouts and presentation.
- Add your ideas of low cost materials that you think would be needed by commenting to this post...
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A bunch of Linux case studies
Linux Case Study : Orwell High School http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/linux_case_study_orwell_high_sc...
Detroit high school opens its desktops http://www.linux.com/articles/45028
A Linux case study should describe 2 things:
* economics: number of PC, students, teachers and Linux experts, covered by the case studies above This will bother mostly school managers.
* productivity gain by using Linux
Does it hinder teachers?
How fast children learn Linux? What is the benefit when comparing with a proprietary OS. Suggestion contact OLPC (laptop.org) for a Fedora/Windows comparison. This should appeal to parents: My kid learns Linux at school! How cool is that? It teaches my kid to share with others, awesome!
Teachers could get free Linux training funded by "Linux Educational Fund", in exchange of the promise that they continue teaching it for at least 1 year (bad idea? feedback needed). Also Linux Educational Fund could receive donations from parents and it would be eligible for government (or EU) grants.
>> Teachers could get free
>> Teachers could get free Linux training funded by "Linux Educational Fund", in exchange of the promise that they continue teaching it for at least 1 year (bad idea? feedback needed).
This reminds me, there are many projects where we should be working closer with lugs since these already have established track records locally. Linux needs people on the ground locally to cover lots of ground cheaply. Demoing and being able to be on site to solve problems is very important. There are some motivated teachers (along with others) that might participate in an initial push to create/identify these "ground troops". With a better idea of resources and with people pre-trained, we can then approach larger groups (like teachers in general).
Of course, pilot projects are also important to us to nail down details and figure things out using limited resources. Linux Town (Felton or any other smaller Linux Town) is one place to put some of these tests into action. We can think of Linux Town as a voyage into outer space.. it's a big enough task that we want to leverage maximally by engaging in as many "tests" as possible.
>> Also Linux Educational Fund could receive donations from parents and it would be eligible for government (or EU) grants
Yes. Appealing to parents (once we can sell well the idea w/pilots) makes sense.
>> A Linux case study should describe 2 things: ....
We can start putting together a list of the sorts of things we might want from case studies. We gather a bunch and dissect them to find these items. Afterwards, we can try to fill in the holes by contacting the sponsors of those studies that "lack" parts, and while at it, try to ask for advice, etc. We can build matrices and reports comparing and contrasting. Visuals can help draw attention to some item or other.
>> Suggestion contact OLPC (laptop.org) for a Fedora/Windows comparison.
This is for later I think. Right now we don't know what apps the cut down Windows actually can run, and it does require memory that the XO currently doesn't have. Also, Sugar is fairly new and not as mature as some other interfaces that are used by existing light distros. Overall, I don't think Microsoft makes it easy to compare against their products (unless it's exactly under the conditions they specify which may not fit the bill anyway). I also am not interested in selling closed source monopoly controlled Windows. If we have samples with Linux, we can show those (IMO...). I bought several XO's that eventually I'll put to use for demos since you can buy them in bulk today for schools. I also want to install a lite distro on it.
[I still have to take a look at the links you provided.]
Talks about setting up ltsp.
Talks about setting up ltsp. part 2 gives some advice.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005992
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1006012
When I have time, I'll hunt for more of these types of links I have come across over the years. LTSP school related sites have this sort of material and more.
This is a guide to getting
This is a guide to getting along in communities. It's a bit of an intro with some basic advice. There should be more of these articles around that we can tap, but I'll post this one now by itself in case I forget about this topic later :-)
http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archives/247-A-New-User-Guide-to-Linux-...
>> 2. Many Linux "Guru's" are actually master Google searchers
Most of the other comments are about what to expect and how to maximize your gains and contributions. The article has links that augment the content. It's a decent middle level view that may be useful somewhere in a packet given to schools or as a link. [Remember, to use full text, we should ask for permission.]
land0, at some point you may want to move this discussion somewhere more visible (a forum or better yet a wiki). Or perhaps make it easier to navigate to blogs from the main page.
*******
Update:
Might as well include this link too: http://linuxhow2.com/Feature_Articles/A_Linux_Valentine.html
It gives various reasons to "love" Linux. It might be added here http://getnix.com/index.php?option=com_weblinks&catid=14&Itemid=23 and that list might also fit somewhere when approaching schools.
[A wiki would allow us to sort a little better some of this material that is not official on some .odt. And let me know which postings you think belong on some other thread so that I don't get too confident and pollute too much. Not trying to divert your focus but worried a bit that the postings will grow significantly and stray from the goals.]
An Openoffice subproject to school project
Useful in demos/presentations...
Step one, find a series of tutorials on using Openoffice. Check, I already know of one such set and the OOO site(s) may have more.
Step two, try and get the authors of these tutorials to make video versions. We can also try and do so ourselves.
Step three, try and find all the context situations in OOO where such a tutorial can be brought up through right click context menus or enabled toolbars or whatever. Then try and get OOO developers to code these in. If they don't, we might find someone to do this (ie, I might roll up my sleeves and start experimenting or looking at code).
Step four, add these tutorials (including welcoming video etc) to the distro we will make :-) as part of this school project. This distro should probably be LTSP compat.
Step five, pretend some other apps are OOO, rinse, and repeat. Some candidates are Firefox and the Gimp. The Gimp already has nice tutorials I have seen on how to do numerous special effects (though some of these effects should be placed into scripts/plugins.. but that is a separate project :-) ). Firefox has a ton of interesting plugins that could provide material for tutorials (that may not yet exist). A more advanced app might be blender or one of the other arguably easier to use 3d modeling apps.
Step six, get a flavor of LTSP working on reprogrammed OLPC XO machines. We now have very inexpensive hardware to sell (at least to elementary schools). In bulk these cost as little as $200/unit today, but most schools could get the $300/unit price. The machines are very durable and portable. We may get OLPC to work on an alternative installation (or do it ourselves/get some other group) so that OOO can run on it through the network. That was the point of using LTSP, so that a heavy process like OOO could run on the machines. Anyway, we may skip this step or adjust it. Also, we can have demos with ZaReason etc $200 machines to show how powerful and cheap these are. We can also try and secure some Asus EEE (or whatever else comes next). [Note, the XO have very limited memory and disk space. The disk space would not be a problem if we use LTSP and/or USB thumb drives. RAM though is still a bit limited for my tastes, and so as not to wear out the flash mem, swap is not even a good option. But I would still like to demo the XO even if we recommend an inexpensive desktop in the end.]
Step seven, present and make sure to let them know that this is all a work in progress made possible through the collaboration of a global community of millions of users/devs of which they would become a part.
Step eight, profit :-)
Step ?, give this project more visibility so we can better manage all of this work once we fail to get the needed volunteer support.
Presenting Freedomware to schools
Here is the first draft of the guide. Much more can be added I know I will be adding to it as I progress in this project. Get involved grab the file make your updates rename the file to include rc1, rc2 etc... at the end. Example: ...-0.0.1rc0.odt until it is officially drafted into the document.
Here is the file
presenting_freedomware_to_schools-0_0_1.odt
I may come back to clean up
I may come back to clean up this post later on with an edit. Though it's not that long, I haven't finished reading the odt file carefully. So with that warning...
I like your outline. It was different than what I was putting together
Consider presenting the following:
Testimonials (there are a ton out there about FOSS in general as well as educational settings).
Offers to provide support and/or community support websites.
Demo software and online support.
Demo browser (very important) and office suite type software plus educational software for target group. Demo art software (gimp, tuxpaint, 3d modelling, and others). Demo programming software (some IDE's and use of libraries and show of source code.. "yes, that's the actual kernel"). Then show off a few addictive games that the parents may like. Demo music software (music organizers as well as music creators). Demo general desktop usage and things like burning a CD.
Suggest that students or whoever start teaching classes for the community or for each other. This can serve as extracurricular (or pay in some cases or academic credit eventually) and a way to get the parents to also use the software and not think it is a toy or something "for the kids." The schools can do outreach and provide "schooling" (of the freedomware type) for many in the community.
After we have a working version of this material with most bugs ironed out, we may want to do a pass where we solicit advice from those that have done sales to or migrations of schools. I'll try to get some links.
Then we should make a little bit of noise so that people know that if they want to work with schools (eg, as a business) that they now have some (more?) tools available. Hopefully some will even contribute back.
Case studies: As much as possible, I would like to document examples of how to approach the various stakeholders and in general how to help Jack/Jill succeed in this endeavor (eg, team up with someone with X skills; approach such a person this or that way; etc). We might script some sample conversations.
Also, we could write up a document full of tough questions we may get asked and how those questions might be answered.
This article can serve as a
This article can serve as a (part of a) testimonial:
http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196604987&page=3
>> It quickly became obvious to him that the only way that the state of Indiana could afford the additional computers was to lower the Total Cost of Ownership for each PC. Open source operating systems and applications were the only way to accomplish that, so Mike started a few pilot programs.
[I would want to be prepared to deal with Microsoft offering their goods for free to a school I visit. Will Microsoft put in writing just what they will give for free and for how long? Such a list will probably be found lacking.]
>> And, speaking of hoping, I'm hoping this story gets your school district into looking at open source.
[from page 2:]
>> Companies were starting to prove that a business model based on open source, with revenue coming from services and support, was viable. Big money and big players such as Google and IBM were jumping into the fray. Projects were starting up that had large communities supporting and improving the products and applications. The FLOSS movement was starting to be credible for me. It was something to start paying attention to.
>> In addition, open source software made sense from an economic standpoint. One lesson that I always learned in business was that each dollar in sales translated into just ten cents in profits, but a dollar saved translated into a dollar to the bottom line.
>> In 2006, Mark Shuttleworth's Linux distribution, Ubuntu, won one of the year's top 100 products from PC Magazine, the first operating system to win since the introduction of Apple's OS X. They would repeat that recognition in 2007, becoming the only operating system to on the top 100 products of the year two years in a row from PC Magazine.
[pg 1:]
>> When I first started that job, I often heard faint rumblings from the programming staff about FLOSS, or Free / Libre Open Source Software. Being always diligent and happy to learn about new technologies, I would take a look. And every time I would download software, I would be disappointed with the capabilities or the interface and dismiss it.
But about three years ago, things started to change. In January 2004, IBM decided to wade into the open source area
>> At the end of the year, OpenOffice was declared the best all-around office suite by PC Pro Labs, beating out Microsoft Office 2003.
[And there are reference links on pg 3 that may provide more interesting material.]
This is great!
You have made some,,,
...really good points here. I am almost thinking that you could easily add a couple of these points you make as a continuation of the uppermost post.
- FAQ's sheet
- Fact sheet on demographics
- Study materials from existing examples (from a grass roots perspective if it exists would be helpful.)
We may also want to consider making this LUG friendly as well. That is to say develop a guide for a grass roots local effort. But we can cross that bridge after we have the resources for the individual nailed down.Speaking of guides, I see a
Haven't read your draft yet.