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@fsfe.org https://wiki.fsfe.org/Fellows/repentinus http://blogs.fsfe.org/repentinus/