I know we have a bunch of people who already volunteer to teach in schools. I know that this has a great deal of impact at many levels. I'm looking for volunteers to help with a potential new initiative.
In the run-up to ApacheCon Sally will be running a campaign around the 15th Anniversary of the foundation. It will look at the legacy of the ASF and to the future. It will focus on the ASF as being a place of innovation and excitement. I've recently had confirmation that a representative of TEALS, an organization that trains volunteers to teach in high schools in 20 states. These students take a rigorous college level CS class (UC Berkeley CS10 or UW CSE142/143 AP) in schools that might otherwise have no IT component at all. 40% of the schools are Title 1 schools (as a Brit I had to look this up, in short it's about improving academic achievements of the disadvantaged [1]) and a dozen or so are in very rural areas. Furthermore, 25% of their students are girls and 25% are from minority groups (in other words this has an impact on diversity). My ask of the ComDev PMC is for us to run a BOF at ApacheCon to figure out how we might enable ASF community members to assist with the work that TEALS (and similar) organizations do. I'm happy to help drive this, but ideally there will be a couple of volunteers here who are interested enough to take ownership. I'm working with Sally to find other valuable folks to participate and hope to have more than just TEALS represented. What I would like to do, in a perfect world, is announce a partnership at ApacheCon. Failing that I would like to develop the outline of a partnership at ApacheCon itself. So, please step forward if you are interested in volunteering (there's no need for you to be present in Austin, though that would be great). Ross [1] http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg1.html Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation
