A pan-European DFD activity proposal

[Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild]

No-one interested?

On 3 February 2012 15:18, Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild
<repentinus at fsfe.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I proposed organizing a student essay competition on Free Software and
> Open Standards topics.
>
> The original letter to the DFD mailing list:
>> I would like to propose organizing an essay competition for European
>> high school students on Free Software and Open Standards issues. This
>> would have several benefits: it would encourage people to think about
>> Free Software and Open Standards; it would expose more young people to
>> the issues of Free Software and Open Standards (I am of the opinion
>> that educational institutions would rather advertise a student essay
>> competition than distribute, say, FSFE leaflets); it would popularize
>> Free Software; we would probably get new good texts to promote Open
>> Standards and Free Software; if we announced the winners on the DFD
>> using an Open Standard, we would celebrate it in a very suitable
>> fashion and would further publicize the DFD.
>>
>> I am now going to propose some ideas that could be developed into
>> topics if you agree it is a good idea.
>> -> What am I going to do on the DFD to advance Open Standards and
>> promote Free Software?/What would my ideal DFD experience be?
>> -> What should be done to promote Open Standards?
>> -> What am I going to do to ensure that my government will use open
>> document formats?
>> -> Open standards vs proprietary specifications
>>
>> Should you agree that such an activity would be nice, we would have to
>> act pretty fast. If we wanted to announce the winners on the DFD, the
>> deadline for sending essays would have to be the 14th of March at the
>> latest and we would probably want to give people at least a month to
>> think and write. We would probably have to have our volunteers contact
>> the national ministries of education and media at least another week
>> in advance. Which means, that should we agree to do this, we would
>> have to have everything decided by the 7th of February.
>
> Following deliberation on the df-coordination@, we have come to the
> agreement that it would be better to organize a blog post competition
> and we should stick to a small number of countries (like 3) this year
> due tto time constraints. Thus, as I would be able to coordinate and
> publicize this in Estonia, I am looking for volunteers who would be
> willing to run it in two additional countries.
>
> Furthermore, prize ideas would be welcome.
>> I think that as we want to popularize Free Software and Open
>> Standards, the prizes could be somehow related to the FSFE. The prizes
>> should be decided based on whether we want to primarily appeal to
>> students who already have an inclination for Free Software or students
>> who do not. If we want to encourage people who have an affinity for
>> Free Software to get active, then we could offer something from the
>> FSFE shop, a FSFE Fellowship, or a Free Software book, etc... If we
>> want to appeal to more students, we would probably have to offer
>> monetary rewards or hardware. I am not sure which group we should
>> target, thus prize ideas and suggestions would be welcome from other
>> interlocutors.
>
> Also, any offers to participate in a jury to grade the entries would
> also be appreciated.
>
>
> Faithfully,
> --
> Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild
> <repentinus at fsfe.org>
> <https://wiki.fsfe.org/Fellows/repentinus>
> <http://blogs.fsfe.org/repentinus/>



-- 
Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild
<repentinus at fsfe.org>
<https://wiki.fsfe.org/Fellows/repentinus>
<http://blogs.fsfe.org/repentinus/>