Hi, I admit to find their packaging fairly pleasant, although one should not expect too many random visitors in a book store/web site that are curious enough to buy that product by chance. In order to be attractive to buyers, the description would have to explain the set of the user's problems that the Debian distribution solves. We'd need use cases. If we can fill a page of such: perfect. We should announce them not only in that marginal product but everywhere. The use case that is frequently being forgotten is that of an audience, a community ... I'll elaborate on this thought a bit: Assuming that DebianMed's key clients^H^H^H^H^H^H^H users are medical doctors or preclinical researchers, I am fairly confident that we should expect roughly about Zerro direct positive effects from the OpenSourceFactory's package. From my experience with forcing life science students that are all Windows-savvy into _using_ Linux and its tools on their everything-installed-for-them-at-a-keypress computer lab, about 90% seem to get around with it in a kind of OKish or better fashion. They all have some Java programming skills. Of these, around 5-10% also have the ambition to seek and extend their personal frontiers in computing. For them, the Open Source world is a gem. We should not care about getting the full 90%. We should only care about the 5-10% ... but the right 5-10%. But now, getting back to the book store: A medical doctor will not go after Debian unless She knows * his/er telescope can display stars/satellites/planets nicer with Debian * his/er model trains crash less frequently with Debian * his/er kids learn more about computing with Debian than with Windows * She gets more tax back with Debian * ... She will never dare to toy around with his/er professional equipment in the clinics. And She will not tamper the running windows machine at home. She will use a spare computer and most likely ask a friend to install things. Hence, if my understanding is kind of matching real life: there is not much of a point to expect fully trained doctors to buy into Linux hoping for professional assitance in the first place. With a few exeptions, medical doctors are used to pay for computing services - they just cannot do it themselves and updates because of changes in the health system are intrinsically painful. And they expect it to be a PITA untill some customisation works kind of like hoped. For them, Open Source communities are completely unreal environment. They do not know about how to behave and whom to talk to. The initially mentioned use cases should not necessarily expect the doctors to solve problems themselves. Maybe it would be sufficient if we helped doctors to better phrase their problem. It would be nice though if we could present ourselves as a community of ITlers that like medical professions, that listens to medical IT issues and that might have an advice here or there that eventually ends up in a working solution. Of the medical professionals at Universities, at least in Germany, Doctors involved in research all get in contact with Linux or Linux people on a regular basis. It is them who analyse their data or contribute to the analysis. There is little if at all preclinical research that does not involve universities and big pharma knows Linux. Local doctors that have their expensive local environment set up are very unlikely to change a running system. If there was an Open System ripe for installation in a young doctor's real life then it would be taught. Summary: Those who need to know are likely to know about Linux and Debian already. IMO, Open Source should present itself as a community, not as a product. We could mention ourselves as communities. Cheers, Steffen On Friday 05 January 2007 12:26, Andreas Tille wrote: > Hi all, > > Open Source Factory is a German reseller of Debian CDs > > http://www.opensourcefactory.com/cms/index.php?page=Home > > They want to start an experiment to design their box according > to user wishes. This also includes requesting some content of > the manual. You can ask for (probably even more *provide*) > some content under > > http://wiki.opensourcefactory.com/index.php/Handbuch > > The question is: Do we want to write a short article about > the CDDs contained in Etch that are Debian-Edu, Debian-Jr and > Debian-Med. I would see this as a chance to make CDDs more > pupular because I doubt thet they would be mentioned if > we don't ask for it. > > Kind regards > > Andreas. > > -- > http://fam-tille.de
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