Ubuntu Wiki

Introduction

Edubuntu is an Ubuntu-based project and product that provides schools, students, parents, and teachers an education-focused operating system. This document outlines Edubuntu's goals and strategies as well as community structure and development policies.

Mission Statement

Edubuntu will provide students, teachers, and administrators with the best educational tools the open-source world has to offer. It will do so with a focus on usability and simplicity. Edubuntu is based on Ubuntu and so brings with it Ubuntu's philosophies and commitments.

Branding & Naming

Ubuntu Education Edition

• Considerations
  1. the Ubuntu education desktop is achieved by installing Ubuntu and adding education applications (or an education bundle) using:

     • Education Add-On CD or

     • [ Applications ] [ [ Add/Remove ... ] ]
  2. there is no specific install CD distribution
• Decision
  • "Ubuntu Education Edition" will be dropped as a brand name

Edubuntu

• Considerations
  1. Edubuntu is well established:
     • as a "brand" in the mind of users / reviewers / bloogers related to the education sector
     • as rallying point for the developer / support / user community
     • as a term used in documentation / publications
  2. www.edubuntu.org is well established:
     • as a web site for information / documentation
  3. #edubuntu is well established:
     • as a community discussion / support channel
• Decision
  • "Edubuntu" will be retained as the name for the:
    • Ubuntu Education Community
    • Ubuntu Education Project

Ubuntu in Education

• Considerations

  1. there is a newly established information area on the primary Ubuntu website http://www.ubuntu.com/education which:

     • provides an introduction to Ubuntu usage and associated benefits in the education sector
     • introduces potential and new users to the Education Applications / Community / Features / Facilities / Services which are available to Ubuntu users
  2. promotes the Service / Support / Consulting offerings of Canonical / Canonical Partners and Ubuntu Service Provders
  3. "Ubuntu in Education" represents a shorthand term for:
     • Ubuntu in (the world of) Education
     • Ubuntu in (the) Education (sector)
• Decision
  • "Ubuntu in Education" will be retained as a information area / marketing portal on the Ubuntu web site used primarily as an area to introduce people to Ubuntu Education benefits

Hosting Considerations

1. Ubuntu website http://www.ubuntu.com/education

   • used for:
     • general high level marketing / introducing people to Ubuntu Education benefits
     • providing an overview of the Edubuntu project and associated resources {***} see below
     • providing an overview of the download / installation process {***} see below

2. Edubuntu website http://www.edubuntu.org

   • used for:
     • Edubuntu documentation
     • {***} providing detail of the Edubuntu project and associated resources
     • {***} providing detailed instructions for the download / installation process
3. Edubuntu IRC channel #edubuntu
   • unchanged:
     • Community channel for users / developers / support and meetings
4. Edubuntu mailing lists edubuntu-users / edubuntu-devel
   • unchanged:
     • Mailing lists for users / developers

For Discussion

• Consideration
  • Currently, in essense wiki.edubuntu.org and wiki.ubuntu.com are two ways of referring to one real resource
  • The following references point to one real page

    • http://wiki.edubuntu.org/foo

    • http://wiki.ubuntu.com/foo

• Suggestion requiring Decisions
  • Does it not make sense to drop the wiki.edubuntu.org notation and collapse link references to wiki.ubuntu.com

Suggestions

The above points regarding branding should be made clear to existing / new and potential users.

1. an announcement on the mailing lists:
   • edubuntu-users
   • edubuntu-devel
2. the channel topic on
   • edubuntu-users
   • edubuntu-devel
3. the web sites

   • http://www.edubuntu.org/

   • http://www.ubuntu.com/

     • review required

4. the wiki

   • http://wiki.ubuntu.com/

     • review required

Objectives

Objective 1: Education

The first objective Edubuntu has is, unsurprisingly, to deliver an education-focused operating system. This means packaging and maintaining learning, teaching, and administration tools and shipping the best the free/open-source software world has to offer. Edubuntu will strive to ship software that applies to all ages, all subjects, all languages, and all ability levels. Edubuntu recognizes that education is not just tools, but also content. It also sees the need to not only enable learning, but also to enable quality teaching.

Objective 2: Integration

The second objective of Edubuntu is the integration of the various educational applications and tools with both each other and the rest of the Ubuntu desktop. Integration is a key element of an effective and useful computing experience. It means that the educational applications should "fit" in with the rest of the desktop and should work together without user intervention where possible. Complicated installation tasks should be abstracted or eliminated. Programs from outside desktop environments (KDE Edu for example) should be tested to ensure that they are integrated as much as possible.

Objective 3: Usability

Edubuntu's third objective is to provide a highly usable interface for both students and teachers. It is important to note that usability for adults may be very different than usability for children and so special considerations need to be made.

Areas of Focus

Focus 1: Learning & Teaching

Focus 2: LTSP & Administration

Focus 3: Sugar

Sugar should be included on the addon-cd as well as the edubuntu-desktop package. There has been some discussion of branding the sugar running on various distributions as in the control panel there is an 'about this computer' which should contain the ubuntu brand for the ubuntu sugar version. Various elements of sugar are still broken, including the control panel, various activities and logging off the session. Bug reports need to be filed for all of these.

Focus 4: Community

Edubuntu Community

Edubuntu Governance & Teams

Edubuntu Members

Edubuntu Council

Edubuntu Developers

Edubuntu Bugsquad

Edubuntu Documentors

Edubuntu Artwork

Edubuntu Website

Edubuntu LoCos

Code of Conduct & Dispute Resolution

Edubuntu Development

Seed Management

Application Bundles

Addon CD

Edubuntu-specific Applications

Relationship with Ubuntu and Upstreams

WINFLOSS Edubuntu

To give teachers and school admins a better idea of what Edubuntu is all about, and most of these users are currently windows users, it should be possible to test/install educational packages via WUBI or some similar approach. Though this should be a secondary focus, being implemented where time permits.

Branding

In the past the cd-rom containing the educational packages used to be called the Ubuntu educational add-on (Hardy and Intrepid). This will no longer be the case starting with Jaunty, instead edubuntu will be used again as it used to prior to Hardy.

So, the project and the cd-rom containing the educational packages will be called Edubuntu but the educational part of the main Ubuntu website will remain "Ubuntu in Education".

The IRC channel will remain: #edubuntu on freenode and the website www.edubuntu.org

CategoryEducation