[Year 12 Its] Microsoft Open Source Programming Awards? [was ProgrammingAwards2006: PD Registrations]

[Donna Benjamin]

On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 23:28 +0800, Nigel Watson wrote:
> However, as a Melbourne Microsoft employee I'm proud that we are doing
> our bit to promote the study of ICT in secondary education in Victoria.
...
>  If the open source community wishes to do something similar - then even better.

The open source community is a global collaborative co-operative of
volunteers. Open Source businesses (in Victoria) are, on the whole,
quite small and most simply do not have a spare $15,000 in their
'marketing' or 'business development' budgets to 'donate' to such
efforts. 

Perhaps Microsoft could fund an open source programming competition that
invited students to use whatever tools and languages they (and their
teachers) preferred, the only proviso being that they make the code
'open source'. There are 'open source' projects that originate in VB -
and there is plenty of open source software available for windows.

Nigel - if you're interested in working with the open source community
to help kids get into ICT and programming, I'd be interested in talking
to you about how we could 'Make it happen', because we clearly share the
same aim.

cheers
Donna

-- 
donna benjamin - executive director
http://www.creativecontingencies.com/
ph +61 3 9326 9985 | mob +61 418 310 414
research - facilitation - web development