Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Boaz Rymland]

Hi,

thanks for the answer (and allow me to thank following commenters to whom I
reply soon as well).
Please see some comment below.

2012/2/5 Jonathan Ben Avraham <yba at tkos.co.il>

> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will
> not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek.
>

I disagree. *Its always the time*.
I'm not talking about converting her to FOSS and make her think about
capitalism pigs all day long and suggesting Linus Torvalds as a Nobel price
candidate.
As always, I'm going to do it* step by step*, with careful planning and
little hopes. I only want to be able to read (and print) my daughter's
weekly schedule on my computer. No more. I'm going to prepare small, easy
to digest and short statements about this to my principal. I'm not hoping
that she'll accept them at the meeting's time. I might need to check on
that later. Its a relationship and someone else already said that
"everything is personal". In this case, personal matters matter a lot for
adoption or willingness to try it.


> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer
> using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need
> either PDF or Google docs.
>


Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
yet-another-corporate that even if more "public friendly", not a fully
M$-Office substitute.
I lean toward talking to her about Google Docs and ODT (parse-able either
by OpenOffice or Google Docs as well). I already prepared a template weekly
schedule in google docs. Nothing is more presuasive than giving the person
a half made solution: "here, just fill in here and email! Hey! you can very
easily also "download as pdf" and email that!".


> I found that this approach, mobile devices, works. For example, at the
> American School in Even Yehuda it helped convince teachers to accept and
> give assignments in PDF or via Google docs. The techers made this head
> switch about three years ago when the younger students who were the early
> technology adopters demanded it. It didn't come from the principal, and not
> from the parents either, both groups being generally clueless.
>

I agree with your comment about adopters or better technology. Not
surprising :-)

Boaz.



>  - yba
>
>
> On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote:
>
>  Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 07:20:39 +0200
>> From: Boaz Rymland <boaz.rymland at gmail.com>
>> To: linux-il <linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il>
>> Subject: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
>>
>>
>> Hi all,
>> I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
>> formats of documents the school spreads around
>> routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS
>> Word format and I don't like it as I cannot
>> cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
>>
>> Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
>> years most of them - still I prefer having a
>> refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at
>> least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats.
>>
>> Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Boaz.
>>
>>
>>
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