Hello Edubuntuers, I have just subscribed to this mailing list and I think it could be nice to present myself and the organization where I volunteer free time for the promotion of free software in education.
I am volunteer and president at OFSET[1]. OFSET means "Orgnani[s|z]ation for Free Software in Education and Teaching". Our 1st objective is to develop free software for education. As such we have written some software you probably know as Gcompris[2], Dr.Geo[3] (written by myself), COLLATINVS[4]. Both GCompris and DrGeo won awards in France in 2003[5] and 2000[6]. More recently DrGeo was also accredited by the Italian INDIRE public institution[7]. If you look closely you will see that both Gcompris and DrGeo are in the Gnome repository although we are not really Gnome projects. Writing quality, non-trivial, educational software with good documentation is a very looong process. OFSET was set up to find solution to get sustained development cycles for educational free software. Until know we have not yet found an appropriate model to improve the development cycles. Nevertheless we have been exploring way to get fundings and supports (Bruno's Gcompris way to get financial support out of its Windows port, partnership with UNESCO,...) In 2002, we started with the freeduc-cd concept[8]. The idea was to allow the teacher to have a direct exposure to the free education software available under Gnu/Linux, without the need to get through the installation process of a GNU/Linux. Although it is exactly not related to developing free software for education, we found it necessary so we can enlarge the free software exposure in the education area. And it was a great success as various Freeduc-cd versions were downloaded about 75000 times since 2002. Thanks to Freeduc-cd, we were invited to join you at the Edubuntu submit, but sadly we were a lot to join the RMLL/LSM meeting at this same time in Djion, France. I contacted one of our member in UK, but he was not free either to join you and represent us. As a side note, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed we were contacted to join the meeting because of freeduc-cd and not because the free software we are writing. A freeduc-cd alike project can just be a one month effort, which is nothing comparing to the years of effort necessary to the Gcompris or Dr.Geo developments (code, documentation, translation). While working in Freeduc-cd, we had to prepare packages for several applications. Our repository is at http://debian.ofset.org/dists, it could be useful for you to select applications not yet in Debian. Related to Freeduc-cd we had some documentation effort, but mainly in French for now[9]. Style working in Freeduc-cd we recently wrote a web application[12] to design on-line XFCE desktop menu profiles, we have used it for the Freeduc-games[10] and freeduc-primary[11]. This web application is linked to a repository of packages and a repository of documentation to automatically (semi-) build a freeduc-cd with contextual documentations. If you are interested I can said a bit more about these application. My greatest wish is that Edubuntu could make a major shift in how is perceived free software in education. In particularly in the political sphere. Given the success of Ubuntu we can have good hope. In the other hand I also hope Edubuntu can cooperate closely with Debian-Edu. Best regards, Hilaire Fernandes [1] http://www.ofset.org [2] http://www.gcompris.net [3] http://www.ofset.org/drgeo [4] http://www.ofset.org/collatinus [5] http://gcompris.free.fr/article.php3?id_article=33 [6] http://www.aful.org/presse/cp-concours.html [7] http://www.ofset.org/articles/131 [8] http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-cd [9] http://documentation.ofset.org/freeduc/primaire-1.5/fr/book.html [10] http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-games [11] http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-ecole [12] http://linux5.cc.ntu.edu.tw:8080/seaside/freeduc -- http://www.ofset.org/petition Pétition de soutien au développement de logiciels libres pour l'éducation. -- edubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
