Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Africa as a marketing target (?)

On 03/01/2018 12:46 AM, Edwin Lee wrote:

> A good question to ask, is what is LibreOffice / TDF doing in the education market? 

The French Team produced a lot of material that is useful for school
students in francophone countries. Having that type of material
available, makes it much easier to persuade school systems to migrate to
LibreOffice.

One of the dirty secrets of North American schools, is that the majority
of the lesson plans are created and distributed by commercial outfits,
to promote their message. A message that, more often than not, bears
little resemblance to factual, objective, data.

This is why the education market needs to be done by local groups. How
"big" geographically the group should be, depends upon education is
handled by the government.
* In France, for example, the same subject will taught at the same time,
using the same textbook, regardless of where the school is located.
Students that are home educated don't get a free pass. To persuade the
educational to utilise LibreOffice, one needs to work at the National
Government level;
* In the United States, things are decided at the very local level.
Possible the school district, but possibly even the specific school The
The Federal government lays out what it will fund, the state government
lays out how that funding is allocated, the local school district
decides what specifically will be funded from that money. Since local
schools will usually prefer to fund their football team, and ignore
things like textbooks, companies find it extremely profitable to give
lesson plans, and other "educational" materials to the schools;
* In South Africa, funding is allocated at the provincial level, but it
is inadequate to pay for everything that the school needs. Consequently,
schools use whatever material they can get. In theory, corporations are
not supposed to provide material, but in practice, it slips through the
cracks. (Bribes to the appropriate members of the Department of
Education works wonderfully well, in ensuring that your material goes
out. Got to keep those ANC members earning big bucks for doing nothing.);

> My intuition is that its effective to win students over to try to dampen the stickiness MS Office 
> has. 

INGOTS was doing quite a bit in that area.  I don't know what happened
to them.

> At least they will realize that there is an alternative.

At a local community college, there is a small group trying to get
MSO365/Outlook/Edge replaced with LibreOffice/Thunderbird/Firefox, with
the ultimate goal of replacing Microsoft Windows with Linux.

That group is facing some major issues:
* LibreOffice does not play nicely with a11y software. (This is/was an
informal policy on the part of both Nuance and Freedom Scientific. VGO
Group has done nothing to indicate that they will relinquish that policy.)
* Most educational software does not have Libreoffice
support/import-export functionality. If one is going to be exporting to
either Word or Excel format, then why not just use MSO?
* There is little to no intermediate or advanced instructional material
for LibreOffice. By way of example, what is the equivalent of, say,
_Financial Simulation Modelling in Excel_ Keith Allman et. al. (ISBN
978-0-470-93122-6.) for LibreOffice?

Solve those three issues, and uptake in the educational market will be
much easier.

jonathon

-- 
To unsubscribe e-mail to: marketing+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted