My ideas:

Pick a school (public would be good, charter or private ok).  Setup K12LTSP
(or similar) with low cost, but appropriate, hardware for the server and
clients.  Document everything about the process to the penny and second of
time.  Get the students and teachers using it.  Document what they think of
it.  Document maintenance time and costs.  In other words, create a live
test case to compare with the ASP system and costs that our state is
creating.  I understand there are some schools or districts that have
already pilotted the Arizona ASP program.  Find out what they did and
duplicate it in open source as close as possible.

1. Sun or IBM or Intel or Motorola or RedHat or anyone else could donate
hardware and software for the test case system.  Anything donated should
still be given market value for cost calculations.  The corparate sponsors
(as it were) would be able to use this test case for marketing (good will,
community help, hard numbers for cost comparisons, etc.) so they should
want to do this.

Sun could provide StarOffice distribution packages, training and
maintainance.  The have thin client workstations (the Sunray line), maybe
some old ones even, that could be donated.  I suppose these will work with
a Linux server instead of Solaris.

2. How many of those "no-tech-crats" in the SFB have ever used StarOffice
or KOffice or AbiWord?  Or even know they exist?  How about education
seminars or workshops to educate Arizona's education industry about open
source alternatives to M$?  Corporate sponsors can provide materials,
capital or even locations to put something like this on.

3. Press releases from recognized corporate names like Sun (co-signed by
AZOTO, of course) can increase visibility of the problem.  Something like:
"Sun's Arizona office expressed dismay at the deal.  'We could have given
them StarOffice for free.' said Joan Spokesperson. 'Instead they are
spending our children's education money making Microsoft richer.'"

Because the ASP contract is already a done deal, protests would be good for
visibility of the issue but probably not effective for changing
implementation.  What we need is real, documented and successful
installations and demonstrations to expose the alternative in a highly
visible way.  Corporations with interest in the success of open source /
free software can help create new, or further current, (Sequoia?)
successful demo projects.

That is how Sun (or any other corporate entity) can help.

Alan

At 08:37 AM 9/7/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>I have a corporate affairs person at Sun who can help, but she'd like an
>idea of what kind of help we're looking for.  Suggestions?