If you're interested in going to schools, then you may find that the schools are willing to cover the travel costs etc. in exchange for a good educational session.
Something else to factor in, though, is the development of the session content and any necessary materials. That can of course be done on a volunteer basis, but it all depends on how ambitious the sessions are, and whether e.g. a laptop and/or a projector needs to be purchased (although nowadays most schools can provide those, I guess).
Also, would the wikimedians going be paid for their time, or would they have to volunteer it? If you pay for their time, then you tend to get a lot more people interested in doing a session...
Mike
On 18 Feb 2009, at 15:07, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/18 Theresa Knott theresaknott@gmail.com:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote: The only real cost for
that is travel - picking some numbers out of thin air, if we say we want visit 5 schools, with a team of 3 going to each school, and it costs £100 per person to get there, that comes to £1500, a reasonable amount to ask for.
Well that figure is OTT. A more reasonable amount would be 1 at 100 and two local wikipedians at much less. For example an offpeak travel card in london costs 7 odd quid. So by choosing Londoners to visit the London schools costs would be cut considerably. I'm pretty sure the same could be said for other towns.
That depends on to who we get to volunteer. I guess we can choose the initial schools according to where we have volunteers, and probably halve the cost per school. Later schools may end up costing more, since we don't want to concentrate too much on schools in just a few areas.
Of course 5 schools is paltry. Upping it to 15 would easily up the numbers to a reasonable amount.
I was thinking 5 as a starting point to see how it goes. For all we know it might not work and it's all a waste of time and money (I think that's unlikely, but really I can only guess). We'll know either way after the first 5. Perhaps we should see if we can get £750 for the first 5 with the option of another £1500 for 10 more if they go well. After that, we'll hopefully have out own funds to continue (and we could acquire sponsorship from Becta or similar - if we have a few schools willing to say how brilliant we were, it shouldn't be difficult to get funding).
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