POINTS:About
From POINTS
POINTS is mutable. The community ultimately decides what it's going to be.
So, instead, I'll talk about how it came about. (Nevyn writing this by the way).
POINTS was kind of the result of me and Jaco meeting. We met at a pub, each sat with a piece of paper each and scribbled furiously while discussing various ideas.
A year later and the New Zealand Open Source Society held a meeting in Auckland. Don, the president of the NZOSS, described a project they were getting started on - running a pilot programme (essentially a test) within one government department. Their reasons were simple. The government hold negotiations with Microsoft every 3 years. This is for Microsoft Software licenses for all government departments except the Ministry of Education, which do their own negotiations. The G2009 negotiations failed. Instead, each government department now needs to negotiate their own deal with Microsoft.
So it seemed about the right time to start doing something around schools. The Ministry of Education and MS were already in negotiations when I announced that I intended to do a pilot programme, much like NZOSS's, with a school. The idea was that we'd donate 30 computers to a school all installed with Linux on the condition that Linux remained on those machines for 6 months while we also provided support. Prove that it could be done and be done fairly easily.
The timing wasn't great for Jaco, who was organising his wedding.
However, as soon as I announced it, I got loads and loads of information. It was a much more popular concept than I ever imagined. It was evident that there needed to be an umbrella organisation for this sort of thing to be discussed. It just wasn't going to work trying to do this just in Auckland.
I abandoned the pilot in favour of getting an infrastructure up (POINTS). As time went on, I got more excited about some of the less technical things. Sharing information and building on it for the good of everyone. I often say that I'm trying to bring the Open Source philosophy into the classroom, but this isn't strictly true. The philosophy has existed for a long time. However, in this day and age things seem to have taken an un-natural turn. Ideas can suddenly be owned (patents), ownership of our data is a concern as we use different services, we're locked into using particular applications etc.
And so we've ended up with POINTS as it now stands. A place built by geeks for educators. So obviously POINTS is going to have to change. It needs to address the needs of educators - not geeks. And thus, POINTS is mutable.
