[Fhsst-authors] FHSST Update

[Mark]

Hi Everyone

I would like to appeal to everyone who has contributed in the past to please pick up a little section to
write or edit over Dec/Jan. We are very close to finishing physics and maths is coming along in leaps and
bounds. If we can just get everyone involved for a short period we will accomplish a vast amount.

We have quite a few new members (particularly for maths) and things are looking up. With
a concerted effort physics and maths can be finished over the christmas holiday period.  Our general plan for
the next while is:

* Finish off core content this Christmas holiday
* Work with tuXlabs to break it into a lesson structure for the web (first quarter 2005)
* Proceed with final editing and trialing - print sample drafts (first half 2005)
* Use sample drafts to raise money to start printing in October 2005 to distribute in time for school year 2006

General comments:

1) I was able to create the mailing lists for each book as was discussed at the AGM. You
will hear from the administrator of the book you worked on regarding list details. Its only worth joining
if you will be an active contributor.

2) Andrew Wood has been revamping our website and a layout draft can be seen on:
http://www.bruplanet.com/fhsst
Feel free to take a look and send me any comments or suggestions - its not final so detailed comments should wait until
we have a more complete version.

3) Spencer and Rory attended the Shuttleworth Foundation Innovation Bazaar. I have included Spencer's comments below
but would like to add that no matter what happens we WILL be providing our content to the tuXlabs project (run by another
division of the Shuttleworth Foundation). Our content will be in ~80 schools next year:

http://www.tuxlabs.org.za

Spencers comments on the the Innovation Bazaar:

"
The innovation bazaar did not proceed as anyone expected. During the
course of the day, at most 8 sets of funders (usually in pairs) passed
through the +- 40 stalls (not a good buyer to seller ratio). Apparently
many of the funders who gave verbal commitments to attend simply didn't
pitch. Also those who did come had obviously not read the buyers handbook
and so knew nothing of the projects. The net result was that practically
no funding commitments were made on the day. Only two projects I know of
received funding- one for R70 000 and another for R125 000. The others,
including us, have to wait and see whether those funders we spoke to will
decide to fund us. At the end of the bazaar, when certificates of sale
were meant to be awarded, the MC announced that, although very few
commitments on the day had been made, funders had promised R 10.2 million
in funding and that we should be patient to see how much comes each
projects way. No certificates were awarded as 95% of the projects'
barometers were still on R0 after 6 hours of "selling"!

The DG Murray Trust, through the canvasing efforts of Dr Abel, have
promised to fund some SDU work on our project. The amount is not yet
decided and will only come through next year. I will email their
representative our proposal today. Dr Abel warned, however, that it will
not be a vast sum!

Now it is a waiting game- I am pretty confident that we will have some
takers- the question is just how much!
"

Please help us get the books finished - we'd be the first project to get it right!!!!
Here are some that have faltered and pretty much given up:
http://www.opensourcetext.org/
http://otp.inlimine.org/


--
--
Mark Horner
Jabber/AIM/Yahoo: marknewlyn

Co-author:
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst

"Life is but a seg-fault away ...

Life received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x42074d40 in calloc () from /lib/i686/liblife.so.6"