Firstly, thankyou all very much for making this list possible. I'm very glad to get mails from such wonderful developers, and on such a great mission. Please forgive me for responding to this survey so late.
On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 Raphael Hertzog wrote: >It would be great if each of you could respond (either >privately or publicly if you prefer) to those questions : 1. Are you a debian developer ? No. 2. If no, would you like to become a developer in order to maintain some packages ? I'd be interested, but I don't know much about package maintenance. 3. Do you have packaging skills/experience ? I only have some of the skills required to learn. 4. If you're a Debian developer, are you willing to sponsor people who packages educational software ? I'm not a debian developer. 5. Are you willing to write/translate documentation for educational software ? Yes, I'd like to help write documentation. I wouldn't be able to do any translation though. 6. What area in the big educational landscape are of special interest for you (math, physics, biology, languages, etc.) ? math, I guess (that is my background) 7. Freestyle question. What else would you like to do within DebianEdu ? What do you expect from DebianEdu ? I would like to help to install Debian in Australian schools. I know, for example, that several schools in Sydney have a large number of old PowerPCs that cannot be used by recent versions of MacOS or of course other mainstream OSs. I'd like to be able to take a DebianEdu CD to the school with some informational material, like, say a short talk on various aspects of the use and strengths of Debian that schools see as relevant to them, and encourage them to use their obsolete hardware (for a start ;) with Debian, probably with thin clients in order to set up resource centres for the students to do word processing etc. I'm sure any school would benefit from a room or two of Debian networks. I'm talking a lot, but I've only just started to look into this kind of thing, and so I'm not really confident about approaching schools yet. What I would like to be able to do is put the maintenance of Debian networks into the hands of teachers and students, so that they won't rely on outside contracts for help. I'm looking for some other people to work with. I want to know about existing movements in this direction, and to be able to point out success stories of Linux (and especially Debian) in schools. I'd also like to see Linux contractors being able to take on the kind of large contracts that many of our schools sign, as a kind of direct competition with the contractors that install and maintain networks of mainstream OS. I'd like to know how, in general, these existing, often multi-year contracts would affect efforts to install linux. Do they ever have clauses that prohibit the co-networking of other machines, for example? Forgive me for going on, Patrick Lesslie
