This is key. There's more to FOSS than Linux. Tools like OpenOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Moodle, and Drupal can offer huge savings to schools without forcing users onto a whole new desktop environment.
Oregon is doing quite a bit with open source solutions for K-12. The Oregon Virtual School District - http://orvsd.org/ - serves more than 200 public schools around the state. It's primarily Drupal and Moodle on servers funded by the state Dept. of Education.
Seconded. You'll never get anywhere driving it from the top down with mandatory "we're switching to XYZ campus-wide" decrees. Make it optional. Introduce voluntary users to a good OSS tool in a non-critical area - clubs, non-credit courses, etc. - where the stakes are lower. Make sure they have a good experience by having lots of in-person help. If it goes well for them, word of mouth will become your friend. "Hey, Dr. SoAndSo did this really interesting thing with..." "I wonder what Prof. ThisNthat is doing that has her students so engaged and excited?" Your early adopters become advocates for the cause. They can also help other users on campus get going with the new tool(s).
It's very similar to grass-roots organizing: start small and build momentum.
I saw him deliver a keynote address at the Government Open Source Conference in October: http://goscon.org/node/150
He and his counterpart across the river in Virginia, Aneesh Chopra, are both very open source friendly. Both of them spoke at the conference advocating for open source and open standards, arguing that our government should be as open and transparent as possible.
durable => something that Kofi Annan breaks during the demo Oh come on! That was the initial prototype hardware. The beta 2 OLPCs have completely changed. The hand crank that broke has been removed and the charging is done through a totally different mechanism. I've had my hands on a B2 OLPC that had a cup of coffee poured over it and was working perfectly. Try that with a $300 Dell.
$100 => $175 $100 is the production target price. Of course the initial runs are going to cost a bit more. And, as previous posters have pointed out, the OLPC has quite a few features you won't be finding on that $300 Dell.
Don't throw stones until you've actually had your hands on one. They're more impressive in person than what you see in print.
I've been fortunate to have a 2nd-gen beta OLPC in my hands for a short time. They have wireless networking, a web browser, and I believe an e-mail client is being written.
More importanly, though, why don't you think the laptops should have networking, e-mail, and web browsers? The mesh networking especially is integral in the OLPC's ability to share content (and textbooks) and enable the students to collaborate and share. I would argue that the OLPC would be far less likely to succeed without these tools and I find it difficult to find a good reason why *not* to include them.
These are astoundingly-good machines designed for 6-12 year old children. The post that referred to them as similar to PDAs is correct. They are *not* general purpose desktop computers that an adult would find very useful. They're cheap, reasonably rugged, simple machines that put a plethora of educational tools in the hands of children. Period.
Actually, there were quite a few free activities. OSCamp, the Ruby Roundup, impromptu stuff happening in the halls. I certainly didn't get anything beyond a free exhibit hall pass yet found plenty of good things to do. Yeah, some of the sessions would have been nice, but I feel I got plenty out of the conference without paying the dough.
ASSP is an excellent, cross-platform, open source mail filter that is quite popular amongst my long-suffering Windows mail server admins. Perl-based and platform-agnostic it might be what you're looking for.
Isn't the OSDL already working on this issue?
on
Public Patents?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As a Portlander who has met many of the FreeGeek folks, I am certain they would be more than willing to provide anyone who asks help and advice on how to replicate what they've done. More impotrantly, I bet they'll be quite happy to make sure you don't repeat whatever mistakes they may have made. I am reasonably sure they've also worked transplanting FreeGeek-like organizations to other locations.
I'll second that. I've been running FirstClass servers for more than 10 years now. Rock solid stable, mature, scales like there's no tomorrow, easy as sin to admin. Yeah, it's not FLOSS, but it's still damn good stuff. And it's made by a company who actually *listens* to its customers - I was chatting with one of their lead developers not less than 10 minutes ago. It's worth your time checking it out.
As an Oregonian and a government employee I have a few things to say about this:
I believe the "surveillance" is at least in part connected to the disaster preparedness/early warning system for the Army's Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot.
The high desert around Hermiston also happens to be the home of one of the nation's largest stockpiles of Cold War-era chemical weapons. Under federal guidelines, local government officials were required to devise an emergency evacuation plan for the accidental release of nerve and mustard agents.
Now, emergency responders in the three counties surrounding the Umatilla Chemical Depot are equipped with laptop computers that are Wi-Fi ready. These laptops are set up to detail the size and direction of a potential chemical leak, enabling responders to direct evacuees from the field. Traffic lights and billboards posting evacuation messages can also be controlled remotely over the wireless network.
As someone who lives downwind from that, I'm more than happy to have that surveillance piece in place.
Did you actually read the story?
But here among the thistle, large providers such as local phone company Qwest Communications International see little profit potential. So, wireless entrepreneur Fred Ziari drew no resistance for his proposed wireless network, enabling him to quickly build the $5 million cloud at his own expense.
The government is not doing it. It's partly funded by government dollars in that local agencies are paying for access to it, but it's not a government project.
I'd also like to point out an important point: "large providers see little profit potential". Many rural areas don't even have local 56k dialup access, let alone broadband, because there are too few customers in the area to make it profitable for a commercial entity to build the required infrastructure. Government very definitely has a role in situations like this to provide access for things like education and economic development. If government wasn't doing it, nobody would and the economies and residents will suffer.
Come on now... just because there's some sort of protection doesn't mean the protected person is more likely to take risks.
Now, the concept so many have posted about regarding the IT staff themselves being the greatest risk is entirely plausible, if not likely. Power and a feeling of being above the rules is far more dangerous combination than simply knowing someone's there to clean up the mess you make.
Many of us inside Oregon government have been "clued in" to OSS and have been quietly working with it for years. Just because it doesn't make news doesn't mean it's not happening.
Staying under the radar is often the an effective way of sidestepping the politics (FUD) and getting the job done. Show non-technical executive management a feature-rich, technically-sound and cost effective system with a nice low TCO and they're a lot less likely to care whether it's built upon open source software, commercial/proprietary software, or a room full of monkeys with typewriters.
Lead or no lead (I'm not going to argue that point either way) there are a lot of penguins and *BSD devils quietly humming away in government server rooms throughout the state right next to their Sun, Microsoft, and Novell counterparts.
Just because Microsoft chooses to "smackdown" (to use your term) doesn't mean that many of us within state government won't be recommending the use of OSS when and where it's technically appropriate and cost-effective. Does this mean OSS will always be used? Of course not. But that also doesn't mean OSS *won't* be used, either.
I'm one of the DAS staff who helped develop this system. While cost was certainly a factor - off-the-shelf commercial alternatives were exorbitantly expensive - we also chose the Asterisk-based architecture for its flexibility and the ease by which we could modify it to suit our needs. While we're only using a minuscule fraction of what Asterisk can do, it is constantly being modified, expanded and enhanced. Check back with us this time next year and I bet we'll have tons more to show off.:-)
I guess we shouldn't be too scared of tech support being sent offshore... those aren't the knowlegable people anyway, so they're not exactly taking our job.
Ah, but they are. Why pay for a competent knowledge worker when the customers ignorantly tolerate an unacceptably low level of service from an under-trained offshore manual-reciting dude with a troubleshooting flowchart who works for 60 cents an hour? How long do you think it's going to be before they figure out it's cheaper to give the manual-reciter a part number list and a link to the parts warehouse than it is to pay for someone who actually knows what the hell he or she is talking about? "What's that? The part we sent didn't fix the problem? Well send it back to us (at your expense, of course) and we'll send you another one."
As long as the average consumer continues to buy from companies with such pathetic customer service - which seems to be just about all of them these days - our jobs are most definitely in danger.
(Still waiting on the slashdotted server so I can RTFA)
This is an important point. While the out-of-pocket costs may or may not be less, the freedom from monthly fees is a significant incentive.
I despise recurring fees. When given the choice between a lower-cost porduct with a recurring charge or a higher-cost one-time purchase, I will invariably choose the latter alternative. Why rent when you can own? Even if the cost to build it yourself is significantly more than the cost of a similarly-featured commercial solution, how many months of subscription fees will you have to pay before the actual cost swings the other way?
"Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations"
Funny thing... there are groupware products out there that do this right now. Outgoing and incoming messages threaded together rather than separated with the useless distinction between Inbox and Outbox. E-mail and discussion groups (and more recently, voice mail and fax) all using the same threaded interface. FirstClass has been doing it this way since 1989. Others have been doing it for just about as long. It may be ground-breaking for Microsoft, this ain't exactly a new concept!
Why is TV a necessity? For the most part, it's not. There are, however, two critical functions that boradcast TV still provides that cable/satellite does not:
Broadcast TV and radio are the primary media that emergency management agencies use to disseminate information to the local residents. The EBS/EAS is pretty much useless if a region has, say, a major earthquake and the cable system that supplanted the then-sold broadcast spectrum gets ripped up along with the phone and power lines. It's a heck of a lot easier to get a transmitter back online than to rebiuld the entire cable infrastructure. Seen any battery-powered satellite receivers lately? What about rural areas where cable isn't available? Selling off the broadcast TV spectrum would remove the single most effective tool the regional EMS folks have to get critical information out to the public.
Local programming. Local news and the like simply does not exist in any meaningful fashion anywhere but on local broadcast television. Cable and satellite have already all but killed local programming. Not because of quality or content, but rather due to sheer volume. Take away the local stations (which is effectively what is being discussed) and local programming vanishes completely. Selling off the broadcast TV spectrum would be the final nail in the coffin for what's left of local programming.
The FCC is charged with managing the spectrum "in the public interest." How is a proposal like this in the public interest? Remove access to the medium for a large segment of the population just because they are not wealthy enough? The beneficiaries of such an action would most certainly not be the general public, but rather the cable/satellite companies and whoever buys up the TV segment of the spectrum.
Ideas like this one and the recent vote on station ownership consolidation clearly shows that the FCC is much more interested in profit and stock dividends than their true raison d'Ãtre - managing the spectrum in the public interest. Diversity of ownership and diversity of delivery medium makes for greater diversity of content and greater audience diversity - all of which are clearly in the public interest. The recent statements coming out of the FCC, while claiming to promote diversity, are clearly supporting policies that drastically reduce that very same diversity. Policies like these are highly beneficial to Time Warner and Clear Channel at the expense of Joe Lunchbucket, Betty Homemaker (or is it Betty Lunchbucket and Joe Homemaker?).
Now I remember why I quit my job in TV and started shoving bits around for a living...
Slashdot Mirror
This is key. There's more to FOSS than Linux. Tools like OpenOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Moodle, and Drupal can offer huge savings to schools without forcing users onto a whole new desktop environment.
Oregon is doing quite a bit with open source solutions for K-12. The Oregon Virtual School District - http://orvsd.org/ - serves more than 200 public schools around the state. It's primarily Drupal and Moodle on servers funded by the state Dept. of Education.
Seconded. You'll never get anywhere driving it from the top down with mandatory "we're switching to XYZ campus-wide" decrees. Make it optional. Introduce voluntary users to a good OSS tool in a non-critical area - clubs, non-credit courses, etc. - where the stakes are lower. Make sure they have a good experience by having lots of in-person help. If it goes well for them, word of mouth will become your friend. "Hey, Dr. SoAndSo did this really interesting thing with ..." "I wonder what Prof. ThisNthat is doing that has her students so engaged and excited?" Your early adopters become advocates for the cause. They can also help other users on campus get going with the new tool(s).
It's very similar to grass-roots organizing: start small and build momentum.
I saw him deliver a keynote address at the Government Open Source Conference in October: http://goscon.org/node/150
He and his counterpart across the river in Virginia, Aneesh Chopra, are both very open source friendly. Both of them spoke at the conference advocating for open source and open standards, arguing that our government should be as open and transparent as possible.
Don't throw stones until you've actually had your hands on one. They're more impressive in person than what you see in print.
I've been fortunate to have a 2nd-gen beta OLPC in my hands for a short time. They have wireless networking, a web browser, and I believe an e-mail client is being written.
More importanly, though, why don't you think the laptops should have networking, e-mail, and web browsers? The mesh networking especially is integral in the OLPC's ability to share content (and textbooks) and enable the students to collaborate and share. I would argue that the OLPC would be far less likely to succeed without these tools and I find it difficult to find a good reason why *not* to include them.
These are astoundingly-good machines designed for 6-12 year old children. The post that referred to them as similar to PDAs is correct. They are *not* general purpose desktop computers that an adult would find very useful. They're cheap, reasonably rugged, simple machines that put a plethora of educational tools in the hands of children. Period.
Actually, there were quite a few free activities. OSCamp, the Ruby Roundup, impromptu stuff happening in the halls. I certainly didn't get anything beyond a free exhibit hall pass yet found plenty of good things to do. Yeah, some of the sessions would have been nice, but I feel I got plenty out of the conference without paying the dough.
ASSP is an excellent, cross-platform, open source mail filter that is quite popular amongst my long-suffering Windows mail server admins. Perl-based and platform-agnostic it might be what you're looking for.
http://www.osdl.org/about_osdl/legal/patent_common s/
As a Portlander who has met many of the FreeGeek folks, I am certain they would be more than willing to provide anyone who asks help and advice on how to replicate what they've done. More impotrantly, I bet they'll be quite happy to make sure you don't repeat whatever mistakes they may have made. I am reasonably sure they've also worked transplanting FreeGeek-like organizations to other locations.
Contact them. You won't regret it.
I'll second that. I've been running FirstClass servers for more than 10 years now. Rock solid stable, mature, scales like there's no tomorrow, easy as sin to admin. Yeah, it's not FLOSS, but it's still damn good stuff. And it's made by a company who actually *listens* to its customers - I was chatting with one of their lead developers not less than 10 minutes ago. It's worth your time checking it out.
Come on now ... just because there's some sort of protection doesn't mean the protected person is more likely to take risks.
Now, the concept so many have posted about regarding the IT staff themselves being the greatest risk is entirely plausible, if not likely. Power and a feeling of being above the rules is far more dangerous combination than simply knowing someone's there to clean up the mess you make.
Many of us inside Oregon government have been "clued in" to OSS and have been quietly working with it for years. Just because it doesn't make news doesn't mean it's not happening.
Staying under the radar is often the an effective way of sidestepping the politics (FUD) and getting the job done. Show non-technical executive management a feature-rich, technically-sound and cost effective system with a nice low TCO and they're a lot less likely to care whether it's built upon open source software, commercial/proprietary software, or a room full of monkeys with typewriters.
Lead or no lead (I'm not going to argue that point either way) there are a lot of penguins and *BSD devils quietly humming away in government server rooms throughout the state right next to their Sun, Microsoft, and Novell counterparts.
... baby steps. :-)
Just because Microsoft chooses to "smackdown" (to use your term) doesn't mean that many of us within state government won't be recommending the use of OSS when and where it's technically appropriate and cost-effective. Does this mean OSS will always be used? Of course not. But that also doesn't mean OSS *won't* be used, either.
Baby steps
I'm one of the DAS staff who helped develop this system. While cost was certainly a factor - off-the-shelf commercial alternatives were exorbitantly expensive - we also chose the Asterisk-based architecture for its flexibility and the ease by which we could modify it to suit our needs. While we're only using a minuscule fraction of what Asterisk can do, it is constantly being modified, expanded and enhanced. Check back with us this time next year and I bet we'll have tons more to show off. :-)
Ah, but they are. Why pay for a competent knowledge worker when the customers ignorantly tolerate an unacceptably low level of service from an under-trained offshore manual-reciting dude with a troubleshooting flowchart who works for 60 cents an hour? How long do you think it's going to be before they figure out it's cheaper to give the manual-reciter a part number list and a link to the parts warehouse than it is to pay for someone who actually knows what the hell he or she is talking about? "What's that? The part we sent didn't fix the problem? Well send it back to us (at your expense, of course) and we'll send you another one."
As long as the average consumer continues to buy from companies with such pathetic customer service - which seems to be just about all of them these days - our jobs are most definitely in danger.
(Still waiting on the slashdotted server so I can RTFA)
... to build your own.
Nobody is selling your viewing habits to the highest bidder.
not having to pay the monthly Tivo fee
This is an important point. While the out-of-pocket costs may or may not be less, the freedom from monthly fees is a significant incentive.
I despise recurring fees. When given the choice between a lower-cost porduct with a recurring charge or a higher-cost one-time purchase, I will invariably choose the latter alternative. Why rent when you can own? Even if the cost to build it yourself is significantly more than the cost of a similarly-featured commercial solution, how many months of subscription fees will you have to pay before the actual cost swings the other way?
"Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations"
... there are groupware products out there that do this right now. Outgoing and incoming messages threaded together rather than separated with the useless distinction between Inbox and Outbox. E-mail and discussion groups (and more recently, voice mail and fax) all using the same threaded interface. FirstClass has been doing it this way since 1989. Others have been doing it for just about as long. It may be ground-breaking for Microsoft, this ain't exactly a new concept!
Funny thing
The FCC is charged with managing the spectrum "in the public interest." How is a proposal like this in the public interest? Remove access to the medium for a large segment of the population just because they are not wealthy enough? The beneficiaries of such an action would most certainly not be the general public, but rather the cable/satellite companies and whoever buys up the TV segment of the spectrum.
...
Ideas like this one and the recent vote on station ownership consolidation clearly shows that the FCC is much more interested in profit and stock dividends than their true raison d'Ãtre - managing the spectrum in the public interest. Diversity of ownership and diversity of delivery medium makes for greater diversity of content and greater audience diversity - all of which are clearly in the public interest. The recent statements coming out of the FCC, while claiming to promote diversity, are clearly supporting policies that drastically reduce that very same diversity. Policies like these are highly beneficial to Time Warner and Clear Channel at the expense of Joe Lunchbucket, Betty Homemaker (or is it Betty Lunchbucket and Joe Homemaker?).
Now I remember why I quit my job in TV and started shoving bits around for a living