RfD: "European Meeting on Free Software in Education"

[Christian Selig]

Hi there,

please look at the attachment and take a moment to comment on it. It's a
text file for your convenience.

Bye,
  Christian

Free Software Foundation Europe

Working Group "Free Software in Education"

Request for Discussion:
"European Meeting on Free Software in Education"

1. Purpose

Free Software has been promoted in some European countries through local 
associations for some time. The Free Software Foundation Europe seeks to
strengthen these efforts through linking the scattered associations and
advocating the use of Free Software.

Despite the fact that on-line communication has numerous advantages, there
are quite a few reasons why people should meet face-to-face:

  * A extremely low response time, so ideas can evolve faster
  * The possibility of getting a picture of the people whose names
    you usually only know from their mail headers
  * A possibility to get in touch with governmental authorities

2. Goal

The meeting shall create an impulse for the promotion of the use of Free 
Software in schools and higher education. It is of importance to have
members of some ministries of education and initiatives for europe-wide
school cooperation at that meeting.

3. Program

Considering that there might be people who don't yet know what Free 
Software is or people who have only heard of the Open Source "philosophy"
yet, there should be someone who gives the usual introduction on GNU and
the Free Software Movement. I think this requires a more politically oriented
speech, using less Richard Stallman's style of speaking in personal terms.

Then, which could -- or maybe even should -- be a discussion about why
Free Software is "the right thing" especially for educational institutions,
should take place.

Perhaps some people of the participating organizations can point to or
present successful use of Free Systems (esp. GNU/Linux) in schools.

Besides the program, some Free Software projects (Gnome, KDE, ...) could
host booths.

The program should be limited to a single day.

4. Financial/Org

The best thing would be to find a ministry which is willing to host such a
meeting. The French or the German ministry of education comes to mind.

I don't think that we have a chance to get gov. agencies "into the boat" if
we do it somewhere else without gov. support.

5. Timeline

Hard to say - Free Software has always been a long-term operation, so 
we are in no desperate hurry. The end of 2001 or the first half of 2002
might be reasonable.



-- 
(c) 2001 by Christian Selig
v 0.1 Initial version
This document is under the GFDL