LaserJock

Tonight I went to my first Ubuntu Global Jam event. It was held at MIT (awesome!) in the Stata Center. First of all, as a chemist I was thrilled to be on the MIT campus. I often considered applying there as an undergrad but decided to stay on the West Coast. The Stata Center didn’t disappoint. Secondly, this was the first time since moving to the Boston area a month ago that I actually got into the city (yeah, technically Cambridge, but close enough). I took the Boston metro for the first time, which worked out pretty well.

Finally, I was able to get ~20 Edubuntu bugs squashed and seven packages completely triaged. I also sponsored an upload for one of the Jam attendees. All-in-all, it was a productive time and definitely worth the trip. I especially want to give a big shout-out to the MIT SIPB (Student Information Processing Board) for hosting the event. The pizza was very excellent.

The meeting was well attended with lots of new people (awesome!), attendees included:
bencrisford, nestor, Timequeezer, abruptus, Svenstaro, Lns, LaserJock, asanchez, pygi, Ahmuck, davidgroos, alkisg, jt4sugar, nubae, and some stragglers.

Agenda Item: Lns / nubae – Are they in Edubuntu-members yet?

Due to having only 2 out of 5 Edubuntu Council members still available, it is necessary to reestablish the Council, which is tasked with approval of new members. The Ubuntu Community Council, who has delegated the membership approval to the Edubuntu Council, should be consulted.

Action: LaserJock will send email to edubuntu-devel and Ubuntu Community Council to figure out how to reestablish the EC

Agenda Item: How to effectively advocate/market Edubuntu to schools/school districts

Because the future of what Edubuntu will look like is still in process it is difficult to have a specific discussion on potential marketing and advocacy initiatives. However the idea of collaborating with the Ubuntu Students team was brought up as a general strategy.

Action Item: bencrisford is to email edubuntu-devel with more details for the idea of working with the Ubuntu Students team on marketing

Agenda Item: How teams will be structured in future.

There are currently 14 non-LoCo Launchpad teams related to Edubuntu. Many of the teams are no longer in use or are owned by people who have left the project. A review needs to be done on the teams, and evaluation of what teams are still needed, and work with Launchpad administrators to do the cleanup. It was suggested by nubae to look at how Sugar has organized their teams.

Action Item: Lns will spearhead the Launchpad team cleanup process

Agenda Item: Attracting developers/contributors to the Edubuntu project.

There was a lot of discussion about the lack of developers and contributors in Edubuntu. There were lots of suggestions including:

• demo videos to show potential contributors what kind of things are available
• getting Ubuntu Students involved
• something like Google Summer of Code, but for Edubuntu/Education
• having more specific objectives and tasks for people to do
• better documentation
• mentoring

Action Item: pygi to start thread on edubuntu-devel about building the developer community
Action Item: bencrisford to look into collaboration opportunities with the Ubuntu Learning project

At the end of the meeting there was a general discussion of where Edubuntu is heading and how to move it forward. A major concern is that having Edubuntu as an add-on CD to Ubuntu has been a detriment to users and caused a decrease in interest and users. Anecdotal evidence indicates that a single installation medium is very desirable. Everyone was also encouraged to read the draft Strategy Document and comment on it.

Action Item: nubae and alkisg to look into the possibility of going back to single install disk/media

P.S. The raw log is available. The meeting starts at 19:00

Tomorrow (Friday the 22nd) the education community in Ubuntu will be gathering at 18:00 UTC in the #edubuntu channel on the freenode IRC network.

The topic will be if or how to move the Edubuntu community forward towards Karmic and beyond. The Edubuntu community has had a rough go of it for the last year or so but it looks like some “fresh blood” is wanting to re-energize the project and get Edubuntu back to being a leader in the educational Linux market.

If you’re a K12 educator, an educational app developer, school IT adminstrator, or an Ubuntu developer/contributor who is interested in Ubuntu for education and/or young kids please drop by the meeting. The possibilities are pretty wide open and community is seeking input, feedback, and contributions of all kinds.

This evening I had a great chat with a guy named David. He’s a 9th grade science teacher in Minnesota. He’s working on a project called Growing Communities Of Scientists in his school. He plans to use a set of  “computer enabled science classrooms” which embed thin clients into a student group workspace. David’s also got a great blog where he’s been journalling his experience. This means students have access to computers without interfering with they’re normal learning/social area. A common sight I’ve seen in most computer labs is individual students with hardly any working space and fairly isolated from each other and the instructor. It’s sort of like a cubicle effect. For sciences were you’re trying to get a lot of hands on instruction it’s rather difficult.

So, back to Edubuntu. While David’s been working on the hardware of his computer enabled science classroom he’s also been working on getting LTSP set up along with Ubuntu/Edubuntu software he needs to manage his classroom and teach his students. He’s run up against a problem that is fairly common to educators but is pretty difficult to work with on Linux systems. Simply, he needs to control access to applications. He wants to implement a rewards system where students gain computer privileges (getting to use Firefox, etc.) based on being responsible with current privileges. One of the things that’s great about Linux OSes is that you can install software system-wide and is supposed to be multi-user friendly. However, in this case, that freedom is a problem. I’d love to hear some suggestions on how to accomplish an application whitelist system in Ubuntu.

OK, but back to the title, why we need Edubuntu to succeed. The reason I say that is that Ubuntu and Linux/FLOSS in general needs advocates on behalf of students, educators, and the next wave of technolgy users. People generally tend to stick with the OS they first learn so one of the best ways to make Linux maintstream is to get it into schools.

The problem is that most software development in FLOSS is not centered around education. There are education-specific applications out there (Sugar, gcompris, KDE Edu) for sure, but the OS itself is not always education-friendly. I’ve seen a lot of educators trying to deploy LTSP servers in their schools struggle with applications that don’t behave well with multiple users, even common ones like Firefox and OpenOffice.org. On top of that key needs such as practical user and group management for educators is almost non-existent.

In many ways, one of the primary jobs of Edubuntu is to provide an advocate for educators and students to Ubuntu and upstream software developers. It’s not just about a making a way to install Ubuntu educational software easier, it’s about it’s about listening to educational user’s needs and trying to make some of those dreams reality. If Ubuntu can’t be “Linux for learning human beings” I’m not sure it can really make it mainstream. I’ll go out on a limb and say, as we start 2009, forget the “Year of the Linux Desktop” and look towards the “Year of Linux in Education”

Today we had another great Edubuntu team meeting.  Here is a condensed version of what we covered:

Review of the Edubuntu Strategy
Much of the meeting was spent going over the Edubuntu Strategy Document and related issues including:

• Clarification of educational level categorizations by mapping student age ranges with categories
  • DISCUSSION: Grade level and educational categorizations vary from country to country. Teachers and administrators need to know what software, artwork, etc. apply to them and their students.
  • ACTION:  RichEd to send email seeking comment on age ranges for preschool, primary, secondary, tertiary designations
  • ACTION:  RichEd will draft the South Africa and out the UK mapping tonight and send to the others for input … LaserJock for US, nubae  for Austria, Spain, Germany
• Edubuntu’s Launchpad team structure needs review and reworking.
  • DISCUSSION: A development team is needed to provide for things like bzr branches and PPAs. The creation of an ~edubuntu-contributors team was discussed as a less “harsh” term than “-dev”.  There is also confusion as to what the difference between the ~edubuntu and ~edubuntu-members teams are for.
  • ACTION:  LaserJock to create edubuntu-dev Launchpad team and arrange for ~edubuntu as an umbrella team to hold all official Edubuntu Launchpad teams
• Clarification of Edubuntu’s goals/branding/naming
  • DISUCSSION: The debate about the use of “Edubuntu” and “Ubuntu Education” continued. RichEd explained that Canonical would like to use “Ubuntu Education” for the .iso and contents (Canonical-supported applications) for purposes of marketing to OEMs and leveraging of Ubuntu’s brand strength. The community members agreed with this. Further, the “Edubuntu” term will be used for the project, community, and community-supported packaging.
  • ACTION:  LaserJock to draft “Edubuntu and Ubuntu Education” clarification statement and run it by RichEd et. al

Review of Jaunty specs and tasks (see Roadmap)

The Edubuntu RoadMap was reviewed and several ideas for Jaunty tasks were added. LaserJock encouraged everyone to think of bitesized, feasible tasks for the Jaunty timeframe and add them to the RoadMap. This will allow the team to track efforts and give a place for new contributors to “plug in”.

• ACTION: Everybody is going to help fill out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu/Devel/RoadMap

Set date/time for next meeting

Same time, same place, in two weeks. That is January 21st, 18:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

For people who missed the Edubuntu meeting last Wednesday, here are the minutes:

Attendees: benoitstandre, dfarning, highvoltage, kaingeo, LaserJock, Lns, morgs, nubae, ogra, rockstar, stgraber, and tomeu

LaserJock chaired the meeting and the agenda was located as always at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu/Community/MeetingAgenda

Topic: Introduction of the Sugar environment

morgs presented an introduction. “Sugar is the educational platform / user interface originally developed for One Laptop Per Child, now operating as a separate upstream project under the governance of Sugar Labs.” He also pointed out the Ubuntu Sugar Team who was working on packages for Sugar. morgs will be starting a discussion on the edubuntu-devel mailing list about integrating Sugar and the Ubuntu Sugar Team into the Edubuntu project.

Topic: Should Edubuntu have a strategy document?

Edubuntu is currently in somewhat of a state of organizational and developmental flux. Edubuntu has become an addon to Ubuntu (rather than a derived full OS), LTSP has moved to the Ubuntu Alternate CD, and the Edubuntu lead developer has moved to the Ubuntu Mobile team. Consequently, LaserJock proposed that creation of an Edubuntu Strategy Document would be a good idea. The idea is based off of the Xubuntu Strategy Document created during Intrepid. LaserJock will create an initial draft and start discussion on the edubuntu-devel mailing list.

Topic: Naming/Branding (“Edubuntu“, “Ubuntu in Education“, “Ubuntu Education Edition“)

As Edubuntu as a project and product have evolved, various branding and marketing initiatives have led to a somewhat unclear and confusing state for the naming and branding of Edubuntu CDs. After some discussion there was agreement that the community should try to work with Canonical to drop “Ubuntu Education Edition“, clarify “Edubuntu” as the community, project, and product it has traditionally been known as, and use “Ubuntu in Education” as a distinct, but related, term to describe the use of the Ubuntu family of products in Education.

Topic: Drop Alternate CD LTSP installation and instead use GUI from Ubuntu Desktop

There was a brief discussion around a proposal added to the agenda to remove LTSP from the Ubuntu Alternate CD and instead have a GUI installer that would install LTSP on any existing Ubuntu Desktop. ogra and stgraber explained that it was technically not feasible to do.

Topic: Should Edubuntu produce a demo LiveCD?

Since Edubuntu is used as an addon CD there is no live CD available for people to demo it. It was fairly quickly decided that a separate, Ubuntu-based, live CD would be too much maintenance. Additionally, there is not enough space on a single CD to include all of Edubuntu. Creating live USB images was suggested as a possibility. ogra suggested that perhaps Edubuntu could create documentation for creating an image based on the umpc images. ogra also pointed to existing umpc documentation for image modification.

Edubuntu at Ubuntu Open Week

My good friend Jorge Castro asked me to fill the last slot for Ubuntu Open Week. I’m a big fan of Open Weeks and participated in a few of the first ones. This time I’ll be talking about Edubuntu, one of most interesting and potentially impactful projects I’ve ever worked on. The session is November 4th at 15:00 UTC so please stop by if you’re interested in education or looking for nice little community to make a difference in.

Edubuntu Meeting

Coincidentally, the day after the Open Week presentation we’re having an Edubuntu meeting on IRC.
Where: #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net
When: 18:00 UTC on November 5th
What: check the agenda, but it will be broad pre-UDS discussion.

This is a great opportunity to get involved with Edubuntu and shape the future of an exciting project.

Politics

As I promised Jonathan Carter, I finally wrote a post on why I’m voting for John McCain. He wanted me to do it before the election, and I’m just barely making it. I was meaning to do it a long time ago but I’ve been busy trying to finish off my dissertation/PhD.

Network Manager

I’ve never really liked Network Manager all that much. Part of it is that I haven’t changed wifi networks all that much, and mostly because I have a static IP address at work. My usual network solution has been to create Home (let NM find my home wifi) and Work (turn off wifi and set up static IP on eth0) profiles in the Gnome Network config GUI. So when I saw that Intrepid wasn’t going all Network Manager and not install the Network config GUI by default I was pretty concerned. Sebastien Bacher convinced me to give NM a chance and after getting some bugs fixed I’m pleased to say that for the first time I’m only using Network Manager for network connections. I even did a bit of testing for Alexander Sack to see how the new Network Manager handled/parsed existing /etc/network/interfaces files. Awesome.

Ubuntu Quality

I’ve been rather busy with the PhD and other real life stuff, but I wanted to give a shout-out to a couple things going on in the QA realm. Leann Ogasawara has been working on the package-status-pages spec. A prototype can be seen at: http://people.ubuntu.com/~ogasawara/pkg-stats/openoffice.org.html . Stéphane Graber is also working on taking the XML output that Leann creates and making nice pages to go on qa.ubuntu.com. This will be a rather awesome addition to Ubuntu’s QA tools. Another cool project on the bug-metric front is work that Brian Murray is doing on the useful-bug-metrics spec. Brian’s working on gathering time-based data from Launchpad so that we can analyze things like the average time a bug sits in the New status, or how long it takes to get to Triaged, or even simply how long it takes to close bugs. This will add a whole other dimension to QA data that I’m really happy to see.

Edubuntu

One of my true loves is education. Creating a FLOSS environment for kids to grow up learning and exploring computing is a sure way for FLOSS to permeate society. Providing high-school and university students high-quality applications to learn and research is awesome. Showing students how to collaboratively develop technology, expand scientific knowledge, and empower open learning is revolutionary.

Edubuntu has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple years. Oliver Grawert and the rest of the crew have made some really great strides developing an LTSP educational server. More recently, LTSP has been shifted to the Ubuntu Alternate CD and now Edubuntu’s CD offering has moved to an Educational Addon CD containing ~500 MB of educational software and other useful packages.

For Intrepid Oliver’s been moving into the mobile arena and consequently Edubuntu has kind of been in a kind of a holding pattern, waiting to see what comes next. I’ve been doing a little work lately to make sure the CD is installable (KDE-Edu 3 -> KDE-Edu 4  required some seed changes) but there’s a lot more that could be done. I think we’re going to need some sort of Project Phoenix to revitalize, rejuvinate, and refocus the project. I’ve was really impressed with Cody’s Xubuntu Strategy Document and would like to see something similar (though probably shorter ) for Edubuntu. Anyway, if you have interest in Edubuntu or Linux in education (pre-school, K-12, university) we’d love to to see you in #edubuntu on IRC or edubuntu-devel/edubuntu-users mailing lists. We want to hear from educators, school sysadmins, developers, students, etc.