Strategy

Revision 27 as of 2009-05-26 22:32:42

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Introduction

Edubuntu is a community of people. Edubuntu is not necessarily a product but a group of people who work together on projects that benefits Ubuntu in education for our users.

Edubuntu's mission is to provide educational software, tools and content packages on top of Ubuntu. It forms part of the larger Ubuntu project and so brings with it Ubuntu's processes, philosophies and commitments. Edubuntu does not focus on developing software, but rather integrates upstream projects and reaches out to form strong bonds with the upstream projects.

Objectives

Objective 1: Education

The first objective of Edubuntu is to bring an 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 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. Integration with alternative desktops such as KDE, Xfce and Lxde will also be considered when implementing new features.

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. Enhancements to operating system and desktop environment such as theming and menus should be explored to make Ubuntu better suited for educational users.

Objective 4: Relationship with upstream projects

The fourth objective is to have sane and well working relationship with the various upstream projects working on the educational softwares included in Edubuntu. That relationship includes working on release together so Edubuntu doesn't ship with obsolete versions of the softwares and also coordination on bug reporting and bug fixing.

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 members may aggregate their blogs to Planet Ubuntu.

Edubuntu Council

The Edubuntu Council team are people elected by the Edubuntu Members to oversee the Edubuntu community and approve Edubuntu Membership applications. The Edubuntu Council also acts as the release team for Edubuntu and so takes technical decisions for the release to come, work on release anouncements and update the website.

Edubuntu Developers

Edubuntu Developers are Edubuntu Members who want to work on packaging and have shown that they're unlinely to do damage to any of the Edubuntu packages. They are working on the packaging of Edubuntu's softwares but aren't necessarily the ones uploading them.

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 Documentation

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. The Edubuntu Documentation team is also responsible for the Edubuntu website.

Edubuntu Artwork

Edubuntu's artwork is done through the Ubuntu Artwork team.

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, they 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, if the Edubuntu Council also fails solving the issue, then it'll be escalated to the Community Council.

Communication

Communication is critical to any community-based project. Edubuntu has four primary means of communication for development:

  1. IRC - the #edubuntu channel on irc.freenode.net network. Realtime Edubuntu development and support chat.
  2. Mailing Lists - the edubuntu-users and edubuntu-devel mailing lists are support and development-related mailing lists. Official information regarding Edubuntu are sent to both mailing lists.
  3. Wiki - the Edubuntu team wiki is used for task tracking, development documentation, and long term organization.
  4. Launchpad - Launchpad is used to communicate to users and other developers about bugs via bug report comments.

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). Current categories include ubuntu-edu-preschool, ubuntu-edu-primary, ubuntu-edu-secondary, ubuntu-edu-tertiary, edubuntu-preschool, edubuntu-primary, edubuntu-secondary, edubuntu-tertiary.

Installation Media

Edubuntu is currently distributed on CD-ROM as an add-on to Ubuntu. Future versions of Edubuntu may be distributed on DVD-ROM or USB Flash disk image as the demand for a larger selection of software, translations or content increases. Releasing Edubuntu as a full install distribution would also require a move from CD to DVD.


CategoryEducation