From November 23rd to November 25th, Raphaël Hertzog and Christian Perrier held a Debian booth at the Educ@tice expo in Paris, France. Educ@tice was part of the Educatec trade show, The Educational and Training Equipment, Systems, Products and Services Trade Show, itself part of the "Salon de l'Éducation" (trade show related to all education topics: the major trade show in the education world in France). The Debian project was invited as part of the Free Software booth ("Logiciels libres: une solution pour l'éducation", standing for "Free software: a solution for education"). This finally prove to be a very good occasion to give a better visibility to the Debian project in an event which is not a traditional "Linux" or "Free software" event. Raphaël and Christian had numerous discussions and opportunities to present the role of the Debian project as the main ground of the vast majority of specialized Free Software projects for education such as Skolelinux, SLIS ("Serveur Linux pour l'Internet Scolaire", standing for "Linux servers for school Internet"), SambaEdu, Abuledu and various other projects. The major attendance to the booth were various people involved in the French education system (school teachers, professors, members of colleges and high school staffs, some visitors from foreign countries education organizations). We are only missing M. Gilles de Robien, the French Ministry for Education, who quickly "ran" near the Free Software pavillion with no stop (either at Debian or any ofther Free Software booth). Our main task was explaining all those people what is a Linux distribution, the place of Debian among the many Free Operating Systems and what actually makes the Debian project somewhat unique. Out booth was twinned with the Schlossgul/Skolelinux-fr booth. Schlossgul (http://www.schlossgul.org) is a non-profit organization from Forbach, in north-easterm France (Close to Metz and Saarbrücken in Germany). Associated with the "Fondation Emmaüs", they built a project based on recycled hardware reconditioned by the members of the Emmaüs community and setup with Skolelinux associated with a companion CD of their own, featuring French educational free software. Schlossgul demonstrated a Skolelinux network which had a big success with the expo visitors. The interaction between Debian and Skolelinux was explained numerous times. We also had long and interesting discussions with Thierry Stauder, who leads this project. They desperately need the help of some Debian developers both for technical advices and for helping them integrate their work in Debian itself. This means integrating their packages but also integrating their groundwork in the Debian-Edu infrastructure. The whole expo was also a great occasion for us to have exchanges with all Debian-based educational projects presented around. Most of these projects, such as Abulédu (http://www.abuledu.org), Ofset (http://www.ofset.org), SLIS (http://slis.ac-grenoble.fr/), SambaEdu (http://www.crdp.ac-caen.fr/se3/) are very interested in more interaction with the Debian project. As a consequence of these discussions, we will probably try to make more work in getting several very interesting free educational software in the main Debian archive, either by mentoring some of their developers or by triggering more interest by existing French developers. Feel free to contact us if you're interested to help in that area. We made the choice of distributing installation CD's for the Ubuntu operating system because most visitors are completely unfamiliar with Linux and also because this is a very efficient way to explain how Debian and Ubuntu interact together (not forgetting the various points that both projects have to improve). Frankly speaking, this was also motivated by not having free Debian CD's to distribute in an event where selling CD's would probably have been inappropriate. This operation was very successful (as always when giving away free CD's, though), and we ran out of CD's in the middle of the second day of the expo while we had 200 of them kindly sent by Ubuntu. We also ran out of the 30 Sarge DVD we had to give away in less than one day. Raphaël and Christian will be happy to hear about reactions (and criticisms...) about this choice, from the members of the Debian project. We think we made our best to explain how Debian is the ground of all other projects, which in our opinion is a very efficient way to give our project more recognition outside of our traditional community. We would like to thank the organizers of the Educ@tice trade show for setting up a Free Software Pavillion, Yves Potin and the "Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique de Versailles" who coordinated the Free Software pavillion. A "rendez-vous" is already setup for Educ@tice 2006 for yet another Debian booth there. On vous retrouvera à Educ@tice 2006 ! (See you at Educ@tice 2006) Raphaël Hertzog (hertzog@debian.org) Christian Perrier (bubulle@debian.org) --
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