The DebianEdu OLPC effort, three first months

[Knut Yrvin]

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