Good evening, everyone interested in Debian Edu, after a very successful event in Brussels, I wanted to take the chance to provide a general update on what has been going on with Skolelinux around here. As you might have heard, Teckids, the free software youth organisation based in Germany, got quite involved in Skolelinux in early 2018. Our goals were (and are) the following: * Maintain a network of support companies and organisations * Advertise Skolelinux as a viable product to schools and decision makers * Collect views and requests from students and teachers and match them with development goals Admittedly, things started a bit slowly, but then, everything around Skolelinux had become quite silent in the preceding years. In any case, our efforts, that started with providing a clean and informative product page for the German language area, climaxed in the “pilot school” Boltenheide in Wuppertal, Germany. In October, we and the school signed a contract in which we started the experiment of turning the school into a “free software school”. The school commited to using only free software and services in their work, as far as legally possible, and also to use and create OER where feasible. By now, all computers in the computer lab, the library, and class rooms are running Debian Edu. We made sure to get everyone involved right from the start, and all users are extremely happy with that. We also started replacing stuff in the school administration with free software, by, among other steps, starting developing a free software client to Northrhine-Westphalia's obligatory school management software. After we published reports about the project, several entities expressed their interest: * A group in Saxony-Anhalt centered around the university of Magdeburg, who advice the ministry of education * A school from Solingen, the neighbouring city of Wuppertal The school is very open, and there are several presentations planned. They invite everyone to see the software and ideas around in operation, also during their lessons, to really convey what is possible with free software. Additionally, we are in contat with seven companies all over Germany who are willing to provide professional support for Skolelinux to regional schools. We are about to start a process of defining standards for that. Last weekend, we took part in FOSDEM at Brussels. As some of you may know, one characteristic of Teckids is that we get children involved in everything we do, and thus the crew running our booth at FOSDEM consisted mainly of four young persons betweens 11 and 15 years of age. Due to financial constraints, we did not feature a lot of fancy stuff at our booth, but the pure fact that an active, yound and engaged crew cares about Debian Edu raised a lot of attention. The kids (with our help) had a total of 212 conversations with a ton of different people, among those were… * …a person from Kiel advising schools, whom I referred to Mike * …someone from the area of London, who explained they had thought that Debian Edu was dead due to the dead website at skolelinux.org, and would otherweise have proposed Skolelinux as a solution for regional schools * …a guy from Turkey, who expressed a similar stance From our experience, we believe that Debian Edu is a technically superior solution for school networks. We are therefore confident that advertising it as a viable product for schools is the right thing to do. We are also very happy about the open, community development model - Debian Edu being developed inside Debian, in the same way as Debain itself, is a very positive thing. Our main interest is to run the “product side” of SKolelinux. Public schools are a very discrete target group, with decision makers finding themselves in a very difficult area of tension. Therefore, it is important to advertise Skolelinux as a competitive product. We are very proud that slowly, but surely, we succeed in bringing together the community and the product aspects, and are very much looking forward to getting further step by step. So far, that's the news! Cheers, Nik P.S.: If there is any group in other geographical areas doing similar stuff that we do not know of, we would be very happy to learn about that! -- Dominik George (1. Vorstandsvorsitzender, pädagogischer Leiter) Teckids e.V. — Digitale Freiheit mit Jugend und Bildung https://www.teckids.org/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature