Strategy
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.
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
Communication
Edubuntu Development
Seed Management
Package Maintenance
Application Bundles
Addon CD
Edubuntu-specific Applications
Relationship with Ubuntu and Upstreams
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: