[education-wg] self intro && current activities related to FLOSS

[David López]

Hi Everyone,

I am David López, lecturer at a small spanish university (universidad de
león). At present time I am collaborating with some research groups and
Telefónica in software development activities under the so called Morfeo
project (http://www.morfeo-project.org/).

I have a personal interest in defining appropriate tools and procedures for
public administrations to quantify the real costs that proprietary software
imposes on their organizations. For instance in Spain under the OEM model
vendors combine hardware costs with licensing costs thus bundling altogether
and precluding transparency. We have estimated that licenses could add up to
40% of the costs associated with PC provisioning at schools.

We are about to finish a simple procedure (based on the german methodology
WIBE) to help non-finantial guys in decision making. Once we have validated
it I would like to have it discussed in the groups for further
improvement/refinement.

Another interesting project I am involved at present time is a market
research to characterize how FLOSS is perceived among spanish businesses, we
expect to have results in a month or so. It would be great if we could
expand the study to enterprises in USA and the rest of Europe.  It basically
asks companies about their feelings with FLOSS.


Regarding the organization proposal for the group I entirelly agree with
Mike and Casey, something similar to IETF: dynamic and agile....

Nice meeting you all:

Regards,

David López




Casey Adams, founder and President of Open Solutions for Education and
former IBM national education practice consultant here.  I have a deep
philosophical interest in open source for education and am happy to see such
interest and hope that real change can be enacted with real dollars.  My
personal interest is in replacing costly and proprietary administrative
applications with open source alternatives and returning valuable funds to
instructional budgets.

Mike,  per your suggestions, I think that an organization along major IT
areas might be an appropriate way to group conversations.  At a high level,
you could have network, infrastructure, applications and telecom with sub
group conversations below. Example sub group structure could be Applications
with Administration, Finance, HR, Instruction and Facilities underneath.
Also, we might consider moving to a Wiki environment if this is going to
result in several subgroups with defined topics of discussion.

I am excited and willing to help in any way!
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