[Year 12 Its] RE: Microsoft Open Source Programming Awards? [wasProgrammingAwards2006: PD Registrations]

[Nigel Watson]

Hi Donna,

Thanks for your comment, and an interesting suggestion indeed.  

Some of the largest multi-national organisations in the world are open
source advocates, or have significant investments in open source
technologies.  My thoughts on this are that if the issue is purely
funding - and from the tone of your email this seems to be the case -
then perhaps the open source community could approach the local offices
of one or more of these organisations asking them to make a commensurate
investment in the future of ICT in Victoria.  As I said earlier in the
thread, the more investment of this kind we have, the better.  However,
this does not mean that Microsoft alone should shoulder the
responsibility, don't you think?

I'd be happy to facilitate introductions to my peers in organisations
such as IBM, Sun and BEA if this would be helpful.  

Feel free to give me a call to discuss.

Thanks,
	Nigel.

___
Nigel Watson | Architect Advisor | Microsoft Australia | +61-405-228-639

-----Original Message-----
From: Donna Benjamin [mailto:donna at cc.com.au] 
Sent: Friday, 9 June 2006 12:21 PM
To: Year 12 Information Technology Systems Teachers' Mailing List
Cc: Nigel Watson; Con Zymaris
Subject: Microsoft Open Source Programming Awards?
[wasProgrammingAwards2006: PD Registrations]

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