Re: [Fsfe-uk] Membership/Recruitment

[Ramanan Selvaratnam]

Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:

> ian wrote:
>
> > If you want anything on education, let me know and I'll do something.
> > Plenty of options to cover things like government policy on social
> > inclusion and the environment
>
> What would be helpful for me is to know where exactly such government 
> policies concerning *adult* IT literacy and social inclusion is. 

I somehow managed to wade into this website (amidst some horrible asp 
driven templates!!)
<http://www.niace.org.uk>
*NIACE's formal aim is: *

   *"to promote the study and general
   advancement of adult continuing education"*

They are also into *advocay* .....

Can we get to these people and find out who they are, what do they 
really advocate, what are their objectives w.r.t software, are they 
aware of the empowering...sustainable nature of free software among its 
many other merits?

Sorry to pile up the questions but I post this with a hope of getting us 
moving in one of the possible direction.


These advocates (they do advocate software solutions a lot it seems) 
might be a good place to start.
Just use their search system for the recurrent use  companies and their 
solutions that do not respect users freedom.
(hint: microsoft, adobe)
If we are to contrast this against the  frequently (often wrongly) used 
words for solutions that respect  the users freedom like 'linux' or 
'open source' the search engine does not give any hits.

More worryingly they even advocate the 'open standards' in totally 
misleading terms.
(with plenty of M$ Word downloads of course!)

eg:
<http://www.niace.org.uk/Organisation/advocacy/NAGCELL/NAGCELL_Technologies.htm>

I know we are all very busy and all but please search for keywords like
'Instructional Management Systems (IMS) project'
or evn look for encouraging sign of inclusiveness as they present the 
case in the section
'Changing local learning spaces 
<http://www.niace.org.uk/Organisation/advocacy/NAGCELL/NAGCELL_Technologies.htm#Changing%20Local>'

Is this not what one speaker at AFFSAC was on about (sorry I do not have 
the details or do not remember names) getting in there behind free 
software products and then advocating more effectively.

I feel there is a lot of realistic opportunity for free software advocay 
for us, here.

We could apporach them formally and via targeted actions like it was  
suggested at the  AFFSAC with education based software(or atleast the 
way I understood it).

> Do you mean 'social environment' (ie,  as in  sharing cooperative 
> happy ...) or environment as in green trees and congestion charge.?
> Either way I am very interested to get together on this aspect of IT too.
>
> Once there was [www.becta.org,uk] with 'ITfor all' splashed across it. 
> Now they  seem to concentrate on schools and few other established 
> methods.
>
> I suspect that there is a huge amount of disgruntled populace out 
> there, who were once taught how to use of products from Macromedia and 
> Adobe under various schemes but still unable to meet their daily 
> software needs.
>
> > and why they should be putting money into
> > free software to further their own policies!
> or atleast stop getting behind unsustainable IT solutions which only 
> breeds scams!
>
> Also, I do want to get back at some local people who laughed at me 
> then, when I talked about free software.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Ramanan
>
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