(FYI: Bala is traveling this week, so he might be delayed in replying to this with his feedback on numbers and experience the past few years.  I imagine he'll reply in a few days when he's back)

Happy to see Caryl and Kennth both excited about keeping the OSSIE track alive. If those interested in OSSIE want to come back with a proposal on what the track should look like moving forward and how best to fill the both the program and the seats in the room I'm sure we could get behind having it again.  

I do like the the idea of finding a way to offer continuing education credits for teachers, as that would likely draw them in similar to how we've done this for the legal track.

For context/background, the original mission of OSSIE was to help Educators find ways to use OpenSource in the classroom, specifically in K-12 environments but occasionally we covered high education.  This was from around the time all the CA schools had vouchers for use in purchasing tech as part of the Microsoft Law suits, while at the same time having reduced budgets due to cuts.  Our vision at the time had been to send teachers back to school with lesson plans they could use in their class rooms as a way to drive free software use in schools, and get students involved early. 

In terms of specific numbers:

* OSSIE has always been a 1 day track. Depending on the year the day has varied between either Friday, or the weekend days.

* Attendees.  I'd need to dig  to find specific number of attendees the past few years. Shyam or Bala who are on list might have it handy.  I think a reasonable goal would be to have 30-40 attendees in the track.  Our smallest room is 60~ theater style, most rooms hold 150+ theater style.  

* # of submissions by year:

2016 - 4 
2015 - 4
2014 - 7 
2013 - 3

Some initial questions I can think of for us to discuss are:

* Where does OSSIE fit with regards to SCALE TNG? They're likely complimentary and can support each other in someway.

* Is our goal to reach educators, students, parents or some combination there of? 

* What day is best for each of the mentioned audiences? (teachers vs parents vs students)

* If we want educators, how can we better reach them and encourage them to attend? Happy to share what we've done in the past.

 
 



Ilan Rabinovitch 
Conference Chair
Southern California Linux Expo
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818-442-1865 Mobile

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On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 9:40 PM, Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho@hotmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ilan,

Why don't you let Kenneth Wyrick and I see if we can get this going? You have given us a list of things to work on below and we can get started right away with such things as whether Friday or Saturday would work best and how to get more educators to attend.* As I see it, an OSSIE track shouldn't be just for educators. With so many parents getting involved in the technology side of their children's education, things like the Khan Academy videos, Hour of Code and Scratch/ScratchJr are things that will have a wider audience than just professional educators.

Caryl

* Maybe we could get  a unit of college credit for folks who attend the entire OSSIE day and pay a small fee. Teachers can use this type of credit for professional development and, often, it can count toward increases in salary.

From: ilan@socallinuxexpo.org
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2016 14:45:05 -0700
To: scale-planning@lists.linuxfests.org; bala@socallinuxexpo.org
Subject: [Scale-planning] Open Source in Education Track (was Re: About the Open Data Track)


We haven't yet made a decision around OSSIE for this year, but as a track it has seen reduced attendance and submissions over the past few years. If we can come up with some concrete plans around what we'd want it to look like and discuss how we can get teachers to attend I'm sure we'd be happy to arrange space again. 

Another thing to keep in mind is we've gotten mixed feedback from teachers on what day to hold OSSIE on if we continue to do so. On the one hand we hear from many teachers they can't attend during the weekend as they have trouble getting the school district to give them a day off for the conference.  On the other hand, we also hear from them that they prefer to keep their weekends to themselves rather than for training.   



-Ilan