Strategy
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Note: This is a draft
Introduction
Edubuntu's primary goal is to create an integrated and usable experience for educational users by enhancing Ubuntu with educational applications, tools, content, and themes. 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.
This document outlines Edubuntu's strategy for reaching its goals as well as its community structure and development policies.
Objectives
When creating release goals, feature specifications, community initiatives or introducing new contributors to Edubuntu development it is important that we have clear objectives in mind. Edubuntu has a three-fold set of objectives that expresses our goals and focuses our efforts.
Objective 1: Education
The first objective Edubuntu has is to bring a education focus to Ubuntu. This means packaging and maintaining learning, teaching, and administration tools and targeting the educational user experience. Edubuntu will strive to make it easy to install and use educational 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 instruction.
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 non-native 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. Usability for adults may be very different than usability for children and so special testing and considerations need to be made. Individual educational applications should be tested by target user groups to gain feedback for upstream developers. Enhancements to operating system and desktop environment such as theming and menus should be explored to make Ubuntu better suited to educational users.
Areas of Focus
In order to move objectives into concrete reality and concentrate Edubuntu's efforts, four areas of focus have been identified. Each is an important facet of Edubuntu's overall efforts and gives new contributors a better feel for areas to work on.
Focus 1: Learning & Teaching
It should be no surprise that one of the key focus areas for Edubuntu is on educational tools for learning and teaching.
Focus 2: Server Applications and Content Management Systems
Server side applications and services that add value to education and classroom environments. This includes LTSP, Moodle, etc.
Focus 3: Administration
Improving user administration, class administration, etc.
Focus 4: Upstream Relationships
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 5: Community
Edubuntu Community
Edubuntu Governance & Teams
Edubuntu Members
The edubuntu-members team are people who have demonstrated a significant and sustained contribution to Edubuntu and education in Ubuntu. Edubuntu Membership gives an @edubuntu.org email alias and Ubuntu Membership.
Edubuntu Council
The Edubuntu Council is the governing body elected by the Edubuntu Members to oversee the Edubuntu community and approve Edubuntu Membership applications. Currently Edubuntu Council membership is signified by being an administrator of the edubuntu-members team.
Edubuntu Developers
Edubuntu Bugsquad
The Edubuntu Bugsquad is a bug triage and tracking team. Members of this team help to ensure that bugs have enough information to act on and are given proper priorities and are automatically subscribed to Edubuntu bugs. This is an entry-level working team that all interested parties are welcome to join.
Edubuntu Documentors
The Edubuntu Documentation team, as one might expect, works on the documentation for and about Edubuntu. This covers several different areas including system documentation, Help Wiki, Team Wiki. This team is a member of the larger Ubuntu Documentation Project Team
Edubuntu Artwork
The Edubuntu Artwork team provides both Edubuntu-branded and educationally minded artwork themes for different age levels.
Edubuntu Website
The Edubuntu Website team maintains and provides content for the http://www.edubuntu.org website. The website is the central portal for all things Edubuntu.
Edubuntu LoCos
Ubuntu LoCo teams are encouraged to create Edubuntu chapters if interest arises. The following Edubuntu LoCo teams have been created:
Code of Conduct & Dispute Resolution
As a sub-project of Ubuntu, Edubuntu adheres to the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. Edubuntu leaders are likewise expected to adhere to the Ubuntu Leadership Code of Conduct. While disputes are rare, the do happen. If a dispute between Edubuntu community members can not be resolved privately, one or both of the parties may appeal to the Edubuntu Council for resolution.
Communication
Communication is critical to any community-based project. Edubuntu has four primary means of communication for development:
- IRC - the #edubuntu channel on irc.freenode.net network. Realtime Edubuntu development and support chat.
- Mailing Lists - the edubuntu-users and edubuntu-devel mailing lists are support and development-related mailing lists.
- Wiki - the Edubuntu team wiki is used for task tracking, development documentation, and long term organization.
- Launchpad - Launchpad is used to communicate to users and other developers about bugs via bug report comments.
Edubuntu Development
Seed Management
The lists of packages that are a part of the Ubuntu Education CD and education meta-packages are defined in the Edubuntu seeds. The seeds maintained in bzr branches and may be modified by any Ubuntu Core Developer. The relevant branches are:
Package Maintenance
The Edubuntu development team strives to maintain all applications within the Edubuntu seeds. Maintenance is primarily done by bug triage and forwarding, syncing and merging packages from Debian, updating software versions, and enhancing communication with upstream software developers to advocate for our users.
Application Bundles
Education is a such a broad category of interest with many sub-categories that Edubuntu seeks to provide its users with helpful application "bundles" which group together related packages for easy installation by users. The application bundles will be maintained as metapackages installable via Add/Remove (gnome-app-install). The current applications bundles are:
ubuntu-edu-preschool - Canonical-supported applications for preschool children.
ubuntu-edu-primary - Canonical-supported applications for primary education
ubuntu-edu-secondary - Canonical-supported applications for secondary education
ubuntu-edu-tertiary - Canonical-supported applications for tertiary education
edubuntu-preschool - Community-supported applications for preschool children.
edubuntu-primary - Community-supported applications for primary education.
edubuntu-secondary - Community-supported applications for secondary education.
edubuntu-tertiary - Community-supported applications for tertiary education.
Ubuntu Education CD
As a convenience to our users, we produce a CD that contains the Canonical-supported educational software Edubuntu maintains. The Ubuntu Education CD is not an independent installation CD but relies on an existing Ubuntu desktop installation, and so allows the user to add on an educational "layer" of applications.
Edubuntu-specific Applications
Edubuntu exists to maintain and integrate educational software in Ubuntu and does not primary develop software itself. At times however, when a particular need is found and there is an interested developer, Edubuntu will take on a application development project. The goal of such projects should be to eventually create a free-standing, independent project. Where possible Edubuntu development should be done upstream rather than creating new edubuntu-specific problems.
Relationship with Ubuntu and Upstreams
Edubuntu is a part of the Ubuntu project and Free/Libre/Open Source Source (FLOSS) software landscape. We strive to maintain friendly and open communication with upstream developers and leverage the knowledge/expertise/skills of other Ubuntu teams for our users.
Misc
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
Branding & Naming
Ubuntu Education Edition
- "Ubuntu Education Edition" will be dropped as a brand name
Edubuntu
- "Edubuntu" will be retained as the name for the:
- Ubuntu Education Community
- Ubuntu Education Project
Ubuntu in Education
- "Ubuntu in Education" will be retained as:
- a information area / marketing portal on the Ubuntu web site
- where it represents a shorthand term for Ubuntu in (the) Education (sector)
Facilities & Hosting
Ubuntu website http://www.ubuntu.com/education
- 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
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
- used for:
- Edubuntu IRC channel #edubuntu
- unchanged:
- Community channel for users / developers / support and meetings
- unchanged:
- Edubuntu mailing lists edubuntu-users / edubuntu-devel
- unchanged:
- Mailing lists for users / developers
see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu/BrandingAndNaming for discussion behind these decisions
- unchanged: