Re: [edu-eu] RFC - FSFE activity "education"

[gerhard . oettl]

Hello

Guido Arnold schrieb:
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 09:57:24AM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
> > Guido Arnold schrieb:
> > > On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 01:23:28PM +0200, Thomas Jensch wrote:
> > > > 4) European network of "Free Software in education" projects and initiatives
> > > Does anybody have a list of projects and initiatives? Maybe we can
> > > start a collection in a wiki. Since wiki.fsfe.org is restricted to
> > > Fellows, it might not be the perfect place for it. Any suggestions?
> > Such a network would be highly desirable. When I was joining a local 
> > initiative I did a quick web research focused only on school 
> > distributions (german and live distributions in particular) I was 
> > astonished about how much distributions are out there. To be a little odd 
> > one could say: There are not too less distros, there are too much. I know 
> > there never can be too much, but without network I fear the forces are 
> > spit instead of added.
>
> I agree that a lot of effort is wasted in re-inventing the wheel.
>
> Nevertheless I am not too concerned about the number of distributions.
> I guess that most of the maintainers are aware of "the others" and
> that they do their own thing for a reason. 

There is nothing against diversity but I would hope a central point would make 
it easier to see "who is out there" and "where do we dulicate work".



> > > > 4) European network of "Free Software in education" projects and initiatives
> > > > 4.1. powerful edu-eu@ ML
> > > > - define tasks for edu-eu@
> > > I think edu-eu@ is a list where people are connected who are already
> > > involved in certain edu projects. I guess, it's a nice place to start
> > > with the international network.
> > >
> > > But the projects should be listed somewhere. 
> > There exists something for that
> > <http://www.ofset.org>
> > (Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching).
>
> I haven't visited ofset.org for a while. I always thought that their
> aim is more the development of free edu software, not so much its
> advocacy. I'll have a look again.

Yes thats the primary goal and the reality. But the following text from their 
community wiki shows that there is a thinking on more:
"The success of free software in education can be achieved by an open and frank 
collaboration between teachers, software developers, translators and authors. 
Therefore we are proposing this portal as a central point where exchanges can 
take place in any suited forms."


> > And there are more of them out there (I would say about 10 at least). 
> > Most of them having "latest news" dated in 2003/2004 and look passed 
> > away.
> >
> > As mentioned above, without a central entry point much of the power gets 
> > lost. So cooperating and featuring one of them may be would be better 
> > than building a new one.
>
> I agree. Once we decided which one to use, we can ping the others and
> invite the sleeping contributers to join us :)

Yes. Schoolforge (which you will know) is another candidate. We should collect 
existing sites first. I have to search my fellow data to enter the wiki ;-)


> > And not to forget, the european union itself sponsors a project building  
> > communities and source forges around open source and free software. Have 
> > a look at <http://www.osor.eu>.
>
> I know that one too, but always thought they only collect news on the
> adoption of "open source". I'll have a deeper look here, too.

Again this is the reality. But the intended goal (which is missed till now) is 
to be a central point for open source on european level. The misssion statement 
says:
"OSOR.eu aims to support the collaborative development of Open Source Software 
(OSS) applications and solutions, particularly cross-border collaborations and 
exchanges of knowledge and software."

The offer:
- Source repositories (Forge)
- News collection (News)
- Community building (Communities)
and more.

Technically there seams to be nearly everything in place whats needed. May be 
they are "sitting between the chairs".

Too little: Open source projects are in most cases international projects and 
prefere internationsl known hostings like sourceforge.net
Too large: For local project (especially langugage specific projects) an 
european level is unnecessary high. And breaking the language barrier - why not 
spread all over the world?

May be there are other shortcommings behind the scene, or even not? So I am 
always interested in experiences about osor.


Writing this I think we also have the risk running into this problem - but lets 
see ;-)



cheers