Schoolforge-UK:About

From Schoolforge-UK

Contents 1 Aims 2 Objectives 3 Membership 4 Executive Committee 5 Affiliation 6 History

Aims

From the Schoolforge-UK Constitution:

• Schoolforge-UK's mission is to bring together individuals and organisations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for UK schools and colleges.

• We advocate the use of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in education, and we aim to see this become the norm rather than the exception.

• We support the use of FOSS methodologies in the development of tools and resources for use in schools and colleges.

• We support the development of non-proprietary technical solutions that will promote equality of access to educational technology

• By FOSS we mean software and documentation and other computer-based resources that are licensed in a way that guarantees four freedoms:
  • the freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
  • the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
  • the freedom to redistribute copies
  • the freedom to improve the program, and release improvements to the public, so that the whole education community benefits

Objectives

• To become recognised as the grass roots organisation to deal with over using Free/Open Source Software in schools and colleges

• To become the central communication point for disseminating information about FOSS projects relevant to education in UK

• To raise and distribute funds for key projects in collaboration with others, e.g. business, universities, government bodies and other organisations, to ensure a healthy growth in FOSS applications in education.

• To build a repository of resources to support the adoption of FOSS in educational institutions, and ensure consistency with the National Curriculum and examinations.

• To provide evaluations of educational applications and their FOSS solutions

• To promote the development and use of recycled, low cost and long-life technical solutions and free resources.

• To develop understanding of the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education, and ensure that "open source" encourages "open mindedness" in a broad educational sense

Membership

• We are a voluntary organisation and membership is free: join us by simply creating an account on this site - see the link to "Login" at top left.

• As a member, you also have a wiki page to provide more information about yourself.

• If your organisation supports our aims, you may also add it in Organisations and Businesses.

Executive Committee

• Schoolforge-UK is run by:

• Chair - Richard Rothwell & Jo Harris

• Treasurer - Kyle Williamson

• Executive Director - Ian Lynch

• Secretariat - John Ingleby

• Webmastery - Steve Lee, Jo Harris & John Ingleby

• PR - Chris Puttick & Tony Whitmore

• Phil Driscoll

Affiliation

• Schoolforge-UK is the UK Chapter of Schoolforge

• We are affiliated with the Association For Free Software (AFFS) and the Open Source Consortium (OSC)

History

• Schoolforge-UK was born out of the Open Source in Education Conference at 2003 in April at Anglia Polytechnic University.

• We are very appreciative of the time and skills contributed by members of AFFS, as well as several other UK FS and OSS initiatives, which have all helped to make Schoolforge-UK possible.