RE: Outreach

> yeah, these solutions wouldn't be great. We can't just have their personal details publicly available, but the W3C needs to run as transparently as possibly. I wonder how other W3C groups generally deal with > stuff like this? Anyone on this list care to answer? Doug? Shawn?

> Maybe we could keep a public Wiki page with links to educators' public contact pages, and an idea of what the relationship is looking like with those educators, and then keep a private database somewhere of > specific contacts' details? Access to the latter could be outreach group only?

What about a Google Docs Spreadsheet that only participants within the group have access to...? Something along those lines. I don't know where we'd store the educators details but we could do with getting that organised fairly soon. I could set-up the public Wiki page with links to educators' public contact pages and add details of the relationship as a temporary thing for the time being, should I go ahead with this or wait for more feedback from others in the group?

> I didn't put them there, but it looks like they are all places that we would benefit in doing outreach to, and maintaining good relationships with. I know P2PU is, for a fact.

Should I or somebody else contact them and invite them to become participants within the group, or perhaps just to inform them of our existence and what our plans are and that we'd like to build a relationship with them?

> You mean, a survey to ask what they want out of educational material, what they need help with, what would make the project most useful, that kind of thing?> I still think it would be most useful to produce the initial set of material, then ask them to look at that and comment, rather than just asking them to comment on the outset, with nothing to visualise.

Yes, something along those lines but I agree with you, we should produce the initial set of material first, but I do think we definitely need to have such a survey available in the future for educators to give feedback to us in a way that can be analysed rather than just having hundreds of educators around the World E-Mailing the list with in-depth feedback that we wouldn't really be able to analyse.

> I really appreciate your efforts so far - this is great! And I would love outreach members to do more of the same. However, my advice is that you are probably less likely to get responses about this in general > web  dev forums, and probably more likely to get useful responses from educator forums, and contacting individual educators and web devs that you know will possibly be interested.

I agree with you Chris. In hindsight it wasn't the greatest idea, but it was a start I guess. I'm going to set-up an account at TES (http://www.tes.co.uk/) and post a thread about our group there to introduce secondary school and FE college educators to the group and see if that receives a better reception. I did some digging and asking around and it seems that there isn't anything similar to TES that is aimed at HE educators so I'm going to do a little research on that and perhaps produce something of a personal project to fill that gap. In the mean time it means that we're going to have to contact educators directly through their staff contact pages. I've made a start by inviting The Web Standardistas (Mr Chistopher Murphy and Mr Nicklas Persson from the University of Ulster) to have a look at our group and jump on board as participants and I'm going to get in touch with Steve Smith, the course leader of the FdA Web Design Course at Wakefield College (http://www.fda-web-design.co.uk/). I'll continue looking for and contacting other educators within the secondary school, FE college, and HE University areas that may be interested in joining or getting involved with the group in some way or another.

If there's anything else you'd like me to do as part of the Outreach Project or if there are any other areas where you'd like me to turn my attention and efforts to then let me know so I can get on top of it.