Follow-up on NPSTAC Meeting

[Caleb Marcus]

I know Martin... we're in the Ubuntu MA team.

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 12:34 AM, Britt-Webb, Erik <
ebrittwebb at concoursgroup.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
>
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