Andrew Cates wrote:
Thomas,
I am sure that WM UK could help. Please excuse my stupidity and give me a little while to work out exactly who is on WM UK before I suggest more.
Clearly, any kind of contacts with technical or schools journalists would be good: we will send out review copies (probably on USB drives). WMF are supporting the launch with quotes etc.
Andrew,
I think my mail went to the list before you arrived so I'll mention a few potential points for collaboration here (sorry to duplicate for everyone else). I'll let someone else tell you about WM UK, I'm very new here.
With respect to "contacts with technical or schools journalists". I'm not a journalist (although I have a small number of connections in that area and have already forwarded your mail to a couple that may be interested).
Instead I would like to highlight a few of my day job activities as they are relevant to the WIkimedia Schools project and, potentially, to WM-UK.
Here in the UK there is an new project funded by BECTA [1] to collate materials relating to open source for UK Schools (not open content, but I think the overlap is strong enough in this case). The project is callend Schools Open Source Project and is only a couple of months old. They do not have a public site yet.
I'm a member of their advisory committee and would be happy to make them aware of your work at the next meeting (Oct 9th). I'm thinking they would be an excellent vehicle to raise awareness of your work in UK schools.
I'm also the service manage of OSS Watch [2], a JISC [3] funded national advisory service to UK Higher and Further Education sector. Most of our activites are related to IPR management and open source project sustainability. However, I think we would be able to spin the open source angle of your work to make it suitable for our audience (we already carry a case study on MediaWiki so it would be a good complement to that).
I doubt HE would be very intested in your work, but I'm pretty sure some of the FE colleges would be.
OSS Watch would be really happy to commission an article about your project (and any other similar work using open source software). If you are interested please contact us via info@oss-watch.ac.uk mentioning that I suggested you contact our content editor to discuss our requirements and payment schedule (you can copy some of this email of course).
NB others with good writing skills and an idea for a case study are welcome to propose it to info@oss-watch.ac.uk (perhaps someone would like to do something as a fund raiser for set-up costs of WM-UK).
Furthermore, we are always looking for decent giveaways for conferences and the like. Would you be in the position to sell us a number of the USB keys pre-loaded with the 2008 version?
Finally, do you have any case studies or similar materials that you use to promote your work? We'd be very happy to carry them on our website.
If we may be able to do to help in some other way please feel free to contact us via info@oss-watch.ac.uk.
Of course, I'm hanging around here until I figure out if we can help WM UK too, so I'll be watching any plans that emerge here.
Ross
[1] http://www.becta.org.uk/ [2] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk [3] http://www.jisc.ac.uk