Linux for Irish schools was Re: [ILUG] AGM 2004

[Brian Scanlan]

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 05:49:52PM +0100, Ronan Cunniffe wrote:
> I would be surprised if "Offering community support" for any great leap
> would be welcomed.  A school will want to either control a project,
> or cede all responsibility for it - and why would this be wrong?

I expect that support would mean "do all the work", inititally anyway,
and this is something that I'd be willing to do - not until when the
platform is mature and we're pretty confident with it would schools be
expected to do any of the installing or whatever. I am going to look for
guidance from the debian-edu/skolelinux folks on approaching schools
etc. - and obviously Ronan's experiences are very valuable. If the
schools expectations are that we take full responsibility, then that's
what we have to do.

> the former, the Broadband for Schools project is an example of the latter.
> A bunch of techies from outside the school offering to help them Do
> Computers In A Better Way is neither, and leaves them looking like they're
> doing some risky while giving them no real control (they don't understand
> it - how can they steer it?).

Understood and noted :)

Ok, back to the easy stuff:

The slides for my talk are here:
http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~singer/ilug-talk.pdf

There's not too much of use in those slides compared to the information
available elsewhere:

NCTE pages about Schools Broadband:
http://www.ncte.ie/Broadband/

HEAnet blurb:
http://www.heanet.ie/services/services.php?serID=122&subID=34

Proper report about Skolelinux experiences in Norway:
http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/documentation/reports/statskonsult_2003_24_eng.pdf

Some Dept. of Education stuff:
http://www.education.ie/home/home.jsp?maincat=17216&pcategory=17216&ecategory=22434&language=EN

Clarifying something I mentioned at the talk - I didn't strictly mean
"forking" Skolelinux, but I think it would be better not to use
Skolelinux. Skolelinux is a Custom Debian Distribution, and I think that
rolling our own CCD is appropiate for the project, initially for
branding, but also further down the line for integration etc. Skolelinux
is effectively a branded and customised CCD based on debian-edu by this
stage - the Skolelinux folks are merging their work back into
debian-edu.

This is a recent statement by the skolelinux folks:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/09/msg00011.html

To being with, the CCD would just be skolelinux under a different name -
"Scoil-Linux", "Scoilinux" or "ScoilLinux", perhaps? The project
obviously deserves a mailing list, and some webpage with information. It
would probably be most appropiate that these are hosted on the linux.ie
server. A nice domain could be asked for from the HEAnet folks who
administer the edu.ie and schools.edu.ie domains - maybe a .ie should be
obtained too - What do people think?

Brian.