samedi, novembre 24, 2007

Ideas for Education project

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Author Ben Bois

I met Frederic Diaz and Nicolas Jeudy this afternoon during Sequanux annual general meeting. Was in Besancon (France).

I met a lot of people from Sequanux LUG, all contributing for free softwares, but in other domains.Very nice and interesting afternoon.

With Fred and Nicolas, we discussed about the Education project. What we agreed was:

- a better definition of Education project is needed
- Education project must attract all people from Education: 3 main categories appear.
- the tools can be divided in three categories too

Other point: we will define the role of local correspondant, probably on the wiki

Nicolas proposed to contribute for the Education website, and thus will help Raphael Bircher, to have something more attractive than the current mess.


Money and resources now: OpenOffice.org project does not help correctly volunteers. Thus, we have to find resources from ourselves.

To workaround that, we will create an association able to help the Education project, means able to receive money legally, and provide receipts to the companies or people helping us.

Concept is simple: autonomy, transparency, and simplicity.
The status are defined ( I prepared everything before), and I'll finalize asap.


Example of project we have in mind (concerning the 3rd category) : buy a machine (randomly: a Mac mini) , and ask for a student -studying in computing sciences- to:

- find a professor, already paid for managing the student. The prof will play the role of the intermediate, driving the student "locally".
- contribute for some feature, writing code, with objectives, and delays.

Just the content of the application will become "external" to the school.

If the code is correct, and the feature is ok (a validation step has to be defined), then the student will be able to keep the machine.


The estimated cost is approximatively around 600 euros per machine. And the applications (included in the student cursus) could concern features who will need 3 months (approximatively) of work. Of course, the main interest is pedagogical, and in return, we'll need reports and documentation about the work done.

I proposed this idea long time ago, and I strongly believe it will help the project to find new developers. At least it will be more efficient than "Advisory Boards" ;-)

Have a professor, is not enough, but will help a lot, and the role of Education project member will consist in help, to discover the structure of OpenOffice.org project, how is the code organized, connecting professor/students with the right developer, ...etc

... was just a draft of just one idea ;-)

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