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(a)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(a)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(a)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