Talk:Specialist Schools Sponsorship
From Schoolforge-UK
Contents |
Political presentation
The real issue will be political presentation. What is logical to us and
even the SST will not be accepted if the DfES think its difficult to
present politically. In reality they can count anything as sponsorahip
and value it at any level. There is no statutory instrument about
sponsorship. However, they will get squabbling between sponsors about
fairness (look at the fuss we made :-) ). They will want to minimise
this. I just think its better to go with a concrete proposal, The more
the better as long as its not to onerous on anyone or any company. I
don't mind holding training sessions for INGOT assessors free as it will
strengthen the scheme and we have in fact charged £100 a head in the
past so we can show it has this value. for a staff of 50 in a school its
£5000 so that is pretty easy to value. Making a free software disc is
less easy because MS could complain saying that the schools can get that
for free anyway (Mind that would give us a lot of good publicity ;-) ).
The honest answer is I don't know how that will be seen they might just
accept it. A support forum on SF UK can be valued too, fairly
arbitrarily. The higher the valuation the more attractive to the schools
and in some ways to the SST and DfES as long as they feel its justified.
Ian Lynch
Ian Lynch adds: I've edited the page to add some stuff that came up at the SST meeting - we now need to come up with some figures to explain out £30k valuation. Matching the MS software set one by one will give us £15k, so the rest will need to be listed and matched with proprietary offerings.
Meeting 18/4/05
Chris Puttick and I had a useful meeting today with a representative from the SST. A lot was learnt by both sides! They would like us to put a 1-2 side proposal to them - and the one that we have had in circulation is pretty close to the mark. Additional things they would like are:
- Some type of phone line support. Chris and I feel that we will need to get some funding to support this - either donation from a willing business or as part of a wider project to support collaborative authorship of software. More on this later.
- People willing to be governors. We think that an approach to the LUGs via UKUUG might well bring to light a large number of people with expertese in OS who might be willing to be governors of schools.
- Continuous professional development. We should offer supprot for staff (teaching and technical) who would want training in OS systems. The INGOTs training might match some of this, as would the recently suggested Schoolforge certification.
- A list of resources. They seemed willing to accept that we could value the software as the same as the commercial 'equivalent'. Simply matching the software on the MSdeal should be worth £15K - so we can go for a lot more than that.
We will need a list of some schools that have included OS in their SST bids - but I'm sure Ian can help with this! I have recommended John Osbourne's school as a reference site for what is possible using FLOSS.
Over the next week or so we can produce a proposal and valuation list and then let the wheels of government grind - maybe we can get it ready for the May 06 round of bids.
Richard Rothwell 18:44, 18 Apr 2005 (BST)
People willing to be governors
Or just via the lug.org.uk and UK LUG Master systems. I have access to the UK LUG Master list as Chair of HantsLUG.
TBH though, we could do a lot worse than approach LUGs directly -
particularly if SchoolForge people could turn up to LUG meetings and
address members directly.
Tony Whitmore 23:08, 18 Apr 2005 (BST)
Governors - more
One way round the governor issue is to get existing or nominated governors to act as the Open Source representatives. Since anyone can be a member of the OOo community, for example, its easy to get any existing governor to be the FLOSS rep. This is important because it makes it easy for a school to participate and its not straightforward to find people who will attend governors' meetings regularly who are not already governors. Some schools are wary of new govenors. I have to deal with this issue just about evey time I support a school. The DfES and SST might not like the exact method, but the schools do. So we say something to the DfES ans SST like we will do the LUGs etc and we will get a sponsor governor representative for the FLOSS community on every governing body because in reality its very easy for us to do that. We just talk to the schools - I can do this easily enough.
I can give you a lot of shools. There are around 50 that have INGOTs built into their development plans, quite a few with Wikipedia contributions. They represent the full spectrum of specialisms.
We could get it ready for the October round. If we got it Ok'd by the end of this term there will be schools looking for sponsorship right up to October. I have a couple of clients now but on past evidence several will ring me between now and the end of term and some even into September. Let's try and go for next round and if this doesn't make it we definitely will make it for the March 06 round.
Well done, looks like this is going to work :-)
Ian Lynch 5:10, 19 Apr 2005
