Hello, I'd like to share with you the summary of my day and half at InterTice 2013 in Paris. Finally I managed to represent our project on Wednesday and Thursday morning, which gave me the opportunity to meet and discuss with around 15-20 teachers or IT advisers/trainers visiting the salon. Although the conference could not happen (see below), I have had the luck to hold a stand between OpenStreetMap, WikiMedia and Framasoft (a well-known French organization promoting free software) and discussed several of our ideas with them.
The most important things to have in mind are: 1. Teachers love DDL! 2. We have several strong supporters in the French National Education. 3. They expect us to setup a financial structure. 4. I now have contacts to help DDL spread even more and develop new ideas like digital contents. The conference ============== Let's start by the bad news… Unfortunately, the conference had to be canceled. Due to last minute changes from the main organizers of the event, all the free software conferences have been moved from a central place to a peripheral place where visitors were quite rare… As a result, the people who presented their slideshow before me recommended to cancel the show and discuss with visitors on the stand instead. I suspect that the room they finally gave us was initially dedicated to commercial talks but, seeing the lack of audience, the organizers probably received complaints from the paying companies… Anyway the slideshow I've written with the help of Elisa and Lkppo is not wasted time. I took the time to write a slide cycling function to let it play on a screen and I'll start to translate it into English quite soon. Visitors ======== I was surprised by the number of people who were knowing the name DDL although they hadn't seen it for real. Of course I took the time to show them how it is designed and for what purpose. All the reactions were very positive, only the development version was showed. People were surprised by the simplicity of the interface, interested in its gradual design, happy with the creation tools, and found it nice. A teacher around 60 years old even asked me why we don't make the same environment for retired people because she would have dreamed to have that when she started computing, saying it was really not easy with Windows :). Another teacher, much younger, told me that, although she's a bit afraid of changing, DDL gave her the desire to try Linux :). A recurring question was for what age is DDL? Although I always talked about the lower limit only (2), people find the graphics quite “baby” and tend to attribute DDL to the range 2-6. For this reason DDL is proposed in nursery schools only as far as I know. That said, people agree that using more neutral graphics would give DDL a larger audience, which I think too (yes this is a message for our graphics designers ;) ). Ideally we should probably let the possibility to choose between several themes. Another frequent question was about installing/de-installing software. The answer I gave is that right now we don't have a graphical software management tool that is easy to use and that only proposes relevant applications (not Apache or MySQL!). However it seems people would like to be able to tune the set of apps, especially because in schools, they may have requirement that don't apply at home, like an office suite. I believe there is also the AppStore effect in people's minds. My neighbors ============ Telling my neighbors that the project DDL has more than 100 contributors and more than 30 languages caused kind of surprise and admiration, then interest ;). So you know what you have to do now ;). People didn't expect such wide-spreading of our project certainly because such projects are usually local initiatives that target the schools of the country. The project origin is France but, yes, this is not a French only audience at all! That said, I had time to discuss about other topics with my stand neighbors. The OpenStreetMap guy confirmed me that they are working on linking OSM maps with Wikipedia articles (OpenLinkMap). I believe this is a precious tool to incite children discover the place they're living in. As OSM wants to develop this feature, we can include this map in our future DDL web browser home page without worrying about its future :). I talked with the girl of WikiMedia about our concerns about digital contents. I told her that, as DDL targets children everywhere in the world as young as 2, we'd like to take this opportunity to show them “the light” :). DDL could and should be one day kind of portal for children to discover the world of the libre spirit. Currently this is very difficult because libre resources are not sorted to ease children's access. She perfectly understood the stakes and explained me why resources are not currently sorted enough. However she was interested by our objective and I have to contact her later to discuss a way to promote a project in the WikiMedia foundation that would solve the issue of children access to digital contents. Finally, I discussed a lot with the Framasoft guys (its founder and a girl). Framasoft mainly collects free resources in a large directory, but they have developed many other services over the years and proudly show 1,000,000 visitors per month! They were obviously very attracted by DDL (the development version of course). The founder proposed me to make an interview on their blog to increase our visibility and to prepare later a Framasoft DVD (FramaDVD) for parents with DDL inside. As you guess, I accepted! NB: one of the organizers also told me he has good contacts with a Debian developers. He plans to ask him if he would like to take our Debian packages back to the official Debian repositories :). This way they would be automatically compiled for any architecture by the automated Debian package tools. His idea would be to have the choice DDL when installing the official Debian distribution! Note that Debian derivative's guys also ask for DDL packages to be part of Debian. DDL and schools =============== The organizers of the free software village of the salon told me the nursery schools of Sartrouville (50,000 people) near Paris all switched to DDL :). I asked for a communication about this, this should happen in a near future. Since June, when I came and saw them for an event dedicated to free software, they told me they convinced several teachers to switch too. The organizers looked all very enthusiastic about DDL. They agree to say that the change can only come from the base, which they are working to make happen! DDL seems to be a strong argument for their crusade. So I believe we now have several strong supporters in the Académie of Paris-Créteil-Versailles. I also met an IT trainer from the Académie of Toulouse who was very interested. There were only 5-6 free software stands, we've been chosen because we represent a flagship project (said one of the organizers :) ). The other French regions should then follow. It's up to us now to provide the features they're expecting in order to increase the DDL adoption in schools. Although our project doesn't target schools especially (we can even say it's rather families!), being officially supported by schools is a strong message to parents! This can also address future partners, for funding applications. So to finish this mail, I'd like to tell a word about our association. Several times people asked me how our project is backed, I mean money. This question arose from the organizers as well as from my neighbors. Currently we have an association but no money (only the payment of an article). People seem to expect that we now have a financial structure to help our project live and grow. To me this means they don't want us to collapse! So another thing we have to do is to make the association live, which means earning money. What I propose for that is to redesign our website to make obvious a donation link :). This is a first step of course. -- Cheers, JM.
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