Follow-up on NPSTAC Meeting

[Britt-Webb, Erik]

Martin,

Thanks for sharing this.  Let me take a little longer to digest and
reply.  Do you mind if I share some or all of this with the School
Portal team?

BTW...Do you know Caleb Marcus?  I just recently connected with him via
the NPSTAC.org site, and he says he's involved with Ubuntu as well.
He's a student at Newton South HS.

Erik 

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Owens [mailto:doctormo at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 3:06 PM
To: Britt-Webb, Erik
Cc: Danny.Piccirillo at gmail.com; janet at janetporcaro.net; Ubuntu MA
Subject: Re: Follow-up on NPSTAC Meeting

Dear Mr Britt-Webb,

It was very interesting being in one of your meetings and seeing what
kinds of considerations and organisational challenges your facing.

I do have a couple of observations from my perspective:

The view on Free and Open Source software isn't really solidified in
members; in the portal project people considered it like is was a magic
vendor who gives no support for products but doesn't charge any money.
This view can be quite disingenuous to what FOSS really is about, a mode
of production though sharing of information and work isn't really a
vendor. Any organisation could make good use of any software available
in the FOSS world by either in house expertise, private out sourcing or
building and working with a community (more on
that)
It may be worth Ubuntu-MA offering to do a short presentation explaining
what Free Software is, what Open Source is, what the benifits of being
free are and why organisations should be demanding these freedoms from
their traditional suppliers. We think using examples in the FOSS world
would be useful too.

I didn't see any thought in the portal group of looking into setting up
a community project, what you have in one instance is a package 'Moodle'
or 'DrupleEd' which does interesting things but because of it's none
vendor status may require setting up and further maintenance. If the
initial set up and ongoing maintenance tasks are difficult enough then
looking towards including a large group of school districts just for
this one project would be more efficient.
Each has technical teams which would work towards getting their own
setup packaged in a useful way for deployment and sustainable
management, but all code and information would be in a central place
that other teams would use and collaborate. I find it hard to believe
that other schools have such different needs to make this infeasible.

I was also interested since my wife works for Harvard Divinity in their
tech department looking after their internal portal project and dealing
with teacher training, conflicting portal products, conflicting schools
using different systems and different back ends and other complex
organisational problems. Even though HDS is a different level the
problems seemed to be the same.

Thanks again for letting us join your group last night. And do let us
know if you have questions or would like us to do events and things.

Best Regards, Martin Owens

2008/2/27 Britt-Webb, Erik <ebrittwebb at concoursgroup.com>:
>
>
> Danny and Martin,
>
> Thanks so much for coming out to the NPS TAC meeting last night.  Did 
> you find your participation in either the 1-1 Learning or the School 
> Portal projects useful?  While they both have technical aspects to 
> them, I'm curious to hear if you think there are any useful 
> connections at this point to what we're doing.
>
> Do you want to continue your participation in any way?
>
> Thanks again for making the effort to come out.  It was nice to meet 
> both of you.
>
>
>
> Erik Britt-Webb
> 617-916-5320 home office
> 617-899-6023 mobile
>
> erik at britt-webb.net
> ebrittwebb (Skype, AIM, Y!IM)
> www.britt-webb.net/erik
>