Thoughts about government funding - US and EU

[Mel Chua]

> I hope we can work together and get some expert help is articulating our 
> vision of Sugar as infrastructure cause so far my experience, even 
> talking to other grad students in the Technology program, is pretty 
> confused looks or board blank stares.

If you "get it," and they don't (yet) - then we have the transformation 
we're looking for, right? Unexcited people are state A, excited people 
are state B, what do we do to get them from state A to state B? What 
makes it easy or hard for someone to make the transition?

What I usually do is to get them to start talking about something they 
love doing, or love learning, or about a learning experience they had as 
a kid, or one they observed in their own children (if they have 
children) that totally fired them up - and then go from there to show 
how Sugar can make that kind of experience happen for others. (It's 
really fun to see your old college professors light up when you show 
them *just* the right Activity.)

This is very unscientific, though. To make it slightly less so... do you 
have half a dozen or a dozen classmates from HGSE, or know of 
teachers/parents nearby, that don't currently "get it" but would be 
willing to sit down for half an hour and talk with us about Sugar? To 
see if we can find out what turns people on about it, as a first rough 
pass with a very small sample size? We can (tape?) record notes and see 
what triggers people to be excited, and how we can get them to learn the 
things we want to get across about the platform (like internalizing the 
stuff on http://sugarlabs.org/go/Main_Page, since it seems like the 
whole "open source" concept is still a little weird to a lot of people.)

> What I want to do is figure out how to get upstream. How do we get the 
> ear of the people who will be changing the way grants are given out and 
> how the stimulus package will be spent.

Great. I guess what I'll probably be thinking of more, and working more 
on, is what we're going to say once we do have their ear - I know 
nothing about how to get in front of whom, but I've been told that I can 
get people excited once I'm in front of them. I'm trying to figure out 
how this works, so I can teach other folks here how to get people 
excited, and learn from folks who do it better than me.

Hm. Looks like I've just found my niche on the marketing team. :)

-Mel