This is not a complete report, but a list of some activities done in the DebianEdu space. This report will be added to the OLPC at the Debian Wiki:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/OLPC DebianEdu haven't been visible on this developer list. Most of our work is done upstream directly to the different free software projects. Knut Yrvin has travelled several times to USA and to various European countries recruiting more developers. Financing the effort is also an issue. Work has been done to get more founding. Mainly we have focused on the machine requirements and the pedagogical effort using computers in a teaching environment. The application for founding is done by Skolelinux in France, Norway and Germany. Also Debian coordinators have done important work. The goal is to pay for housing, food and travel for developers when tending developer gatherings. We are targeting bottlenecks in different upstream projects. The next gathering is Devcamp 2007 in Soissons (France). The camp is from January 8th to 12th. You can join here: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/DevCampFrance2007 * Some details We currently work together with KDE project, Skolelinux, mEDUXa, Edubuntu and others. mEDUXa is the educational Linux distribution of the Canary Islands Government. We are planning to integrate the mEDUXa desktop in KDE4: Desktop for primary schools: http://developer.skolelinux.no/~knuty/meduxa-primary.png Desktop for secondary schools: http://developer.skolelinux.no/~knuty/meduxa-secondary.png Lubos Lunak has made an interesting report on memory footprint when using standard desktop applications: http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/ There are work done tailoring KWord for kids, removing the complex menu's. This is promising, but need more hands on programming before it's ready for prime time. We are currently working with different parties to finance developer gatherings. In 2006 it has been at least 6 developer gatherings with Skolelinux. The most visited ones was in Erkelenz Germany with 56 participants, Extremadura in Spain with +30 participants, and Forbach in France with +40 participants. It seems that we are succeeding with financing the free software developer gatherings in 2007. The next major gatherings in 2007 is planned at Soissons - France, 8th - 12th January. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/DevCampFrance2007 * Other activities -- The FOSTRADA Workshop in August 2006. Workshop on Fun, Open Source, Teaching Research, and Development Aid 2006. Keynotes: Sharing Knowledge for a Sustainable Future - Interaction between Open Source Software, Open Networks and Open Educational Resources. (Brendan Barrett- United Nation University) - Open source enabling aid and business in practice (Knut Yrvin, Trolltech) - Open Source for Economic Justice (Bruce Perens) Other interesting talks: - How to attract more women to science and to free software development (Anne Østergaard GNOME Foundation) - Jakob Thomson from The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) was one of the other speakers. He was writing the recommendation for national foreign aid policy for Norway, supporting Information Technology projects in development countries. The talks and videos are listed here: http://www.eiao.net/fostrada/schedule -- The free software conference at la Universidada de La Laguna in Tenerife (Spain) Several meetings with the developers behind mEDUXa, the educational Linux distribution of the Canary Islands Government based on Kubuntu. Tenerife is a region of Spain that is twice the size of Extremadura. The developers says that they was pioneering the kids desktop before LinEx in Extremadura. But they have not been a high profile project as we have seen with Extremadura. Links to the program at the University de La Laguna: https://encuentro.ssl.ull.es/jornadas/doku.php?id=programa -- Getting KDE developers and other distro project interested in One Laptop per Child. We are tightening KDE Edu developers to join in. We had a One Laptop per Child BoF at aKademy 2006, the nine days developer meeting for KDE developers. KDE4 has promising reduction on memory usage based on the rewritten Qt library. We got a vibrant communication with the educational manager at Ubuntu, Rich Weiderman. The target is clear, make a "out of the box" developer environment that runs on 128 MB devices as One Laptop per Child. http://wiki.skolelinux.de/Kooperation/Edubuntu -- Making integration between KDE and GNOME applications Through the Portland Project, we now got a unified interface for desktop graphical environments, included in major Linux community distributions. Qt 4.2, the primary KDE application framework, is using Portland 1.0 to provide developers with tighter integration with the GNOME desktop environment. http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2006/2006_10_11_beaverton.html By Knut Yrvin, November 12th, 2006 - K _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
