No subject

I'm guessing that most of you have no idea how important penguin 
penetration into the education arena is, and that the remainder of you 
are as busy as a one-legged bipolar sufferer in an egg-and-spoon race.

The bottom line is that the children going through high school now will 
be starting to hit decision-maker territory in less than a decade. If 
all they've seen, all they're used to is Borgware, they're not going to 
be making decisions anything like as favourable to you and your 
interests and industry as they would otherwise.

Microsoft and Apple are well aware of the impact of their presence in 
the education sector, and spend enormous amounts of money in 
maintaining or expanding it. We don't have enormous amounts of money, 
so our only real counter is to spend *time* cutting those who would 
overwhelm us off at the source.

Western Australia and Australia are showcase items for Microsoft. Our 
education systems are locked into anti-competitive site-licence-like 
deals with them, and the time to begin getting our penguins in a row to 
break this monopoly is now. The hardest, least rewarding time to work 
on this is always at the start, and the most crucial, influential work 
in any sector is generally done in the early days.

I don't think there's much point in calling for busy people to drop what 
they're doing and rush to every educatinal event, because they will, 
and they'll make things happen, but other worthy causes will suffer as 
a result. So consider this a call to action to the timid or lazy!

When you see a call to action, winkle yourselves out of your chairs, no 
matter how young, old, helpless, dumb or whatever you are, and drag 
your butt along to the event. If you have no transport, ask on the list 
so someone else who's going can take you.

Even if it's only a few hours attendance at one event, you will have 
made a positive difference, both to the event and to yourselves.

The next *big* event will be in about September, I'll post more on that 
shortly. Until then, don't be shy about looking for and posting events 
yourself! If your local school, or district, or whatever is having a 
day that features computers, tell someone about it and/or find out if 
we can get involved. Same goes for libraries, social crew like Apex and 
Rotary, whatever.

Cheers; Leon