[seul-edu] Summing up our discussion so far

[Doug Loss <drloss@home.com>]

I'm going to try to sum up what we've been discussing about the
Linux educational coalition for the past week or so, and see if we
can get substantial agreement on it all and start implementing it.

We're all agreed that the idea of such a coalition is a good one.  I
think it's an important one, too.  We started to get bogged down on
choosing a name, but I think we've stopped that in its tracks.  We
then started to get bogged down in the minutiae of picking
appropriate tools to administer some gigantic, comprehensive
website, but we shut that down too.

We started discussing just what areas such a coalition should
cover.  Jason Mellen put up a wiki page here
<http://www.seul.org:8080/wiki/edu/Education%20Coalition> that
covers at least some of the functions this coalition should
provide.  The question is, how to provide them?

Some of these functions are already being provided by one or another
project somewhere in the world; sometimes, the function is being
provided numerous times.  Some of them aren't being done at all at
the moment, at least not in a fashion specifically aimed at
education.

My feeling is that this coalition should start as an "umbrella"
group, which provides an easy to navigate and unconfusing way to get
to needed resources that already exist.  For example, rather than
creating another news-site, the coalition site should link to
OpenSourceSchools as an over-all news-site, and to various other
sites for regionalized open-source-in-education news.  As needs are
identified that aren't yet being provided for, the coalition site
could be used to host work addressing those needs; but it shouldn't
set up a subproject for that purpose if someone is already doing
similar work.  Instead, it should bring those others into the
coalition.  Or it could try to persuade current coalition members to
take on the additional tasks.

An area we should address is the duplication of tasks.  I think
members of the coalition should think about redistributing some of
their current tasks to reduce redundancy, giving one group
responsibility for maintaining a comprehensive list of educational
software and another responsibility for maintaining a major
collection of Linux in education advocacy documents, for example.
That would maximize our use of the available resources.  At the same
time, we don't want to set ourselves up for "turf wars," where
people get all caught up in ownership of a particular sector.
That's where I think the governance of this coalition should be by
representatives from each of the member groups.  In many (if not
most) of our groups, we've been fairly vague about who has
decision-making authority, trusting whoever does it to listen to the
views of everyone else and not move too far away from them.  If that
works here too, I'll be very happy, but I think we should prepare
ourselves for the possibility of disagreement by being a bit more
formal and setting up some sort of decision-making process to use
when substantial concensus isn't available.  I don't think we should
wait on that process before moving on in building this, though, as
we are already in concensus that the coalition is needed.

As to what tools to use in building the site, since it would be
basically connections to other sites, the groups at those sites
should use whatever they're comfortable with.  If you're doing the
work, you should choose the tools.  By the same token, whoever's
responsible for maintaining the "umbrella" site should use whatever
he or she likes to maintain it.  If and when we add functions to the
coalition site to cover unaddressed areas, the people taking on the
task of providing those functions should get to choose the tools
they want to use.

Now, what about names for the coalition?  We went through a number
of fairly tortured acronyms before sort of settling on Schoolforge
(since David Bucknell already owned it).  But in talking it over, we
came to realize that we were actually thinking about two different
ideas for the coalition.  One was the "umbrella" site I mentioned
above.  The other was a centralized repository of educational
projects, documents, lesson plans, etc.  I've clearly leaned toward
the "umbrella" site idea, but the repository is needed too.  I think
some of the things a repository ought to do can be covered very well
by existing projects, but we may need a new one for hosting
educational software projects, for example.  So I think we should
keep the Schoolforge.net name for whatever repository we need, and
use Learnux.org, suggested by Phil Collins and graciously agreed to
by Gary Free (who had used Learnux in Toronto a while ago) as the
name for the "umbrella" site.

What should Learnux do initially?  The "watering hole" ideas that
Roger Dingledine put into Jason Mellen's wiki page referred to above
suggest a wiki, mailing lists, and/or weblogs.  The "well-known
place" ideas suggest well-maintained and annotated directories of
information.  Along with these, I think we should provide easy
access to documents that can help advocate the use of Linux in
education, understandable guides to the installation, configuration,
and use of Linux and open source/free software in education, HOWTOs
for LUGs on working with schools to support the schools' use of
Linux, a comprehensive listing of educational software that runs on
Linux, a topical and regularly updated news site on Linux in
education, and a regularly updated list of questions (and answers)
frequently asked by educators about Linux.  A lot if not all of this
already exists among various projects; we just need to assemble it
all.  Where it doesn't exist (the above-mentioned software
development site, for example) we can look into gathering resources
from various projects to put something in place.  But we shouldn't
wait on any of that.  We need to use what we already have to get
this up and running.  Once it is, we can look at longer-term ideas,
like assembling an educational CD for quick and easy installation of
educational software for various purposes over different Linux
distributions.

So let's talk (a little) about this, and see if we can't reach an
agreement by Friday at the latest.  I'd like to be able to announce
the formation of the Learnux coalition (or whatever we call it) in
my next Linux in education report on Dec. 10!

--
Doug Loss                 Always do right.  This
Data Network Coordinator  will gratify some people
Bloomsburg University     and astonish the rest.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain