Candlelight vigil for document freedom and against proprietary software

Report in press and resource.
Photos are here and there.

Some random notes around the Education Project

After a long time the IRC meeting for the Education Project started. However, Murphy being himself dropped in and an unforeseen power outage kept me out of the IRC.

(Note to myself: stop using qualifying words like unforeseen and the like. It is like saying "undue" stress. Every kind of stress is undue, there's no due stress)

The idea I had was to talk about two things:

o Community Building around the Education Project

o Visibility of the Education Project

the other aspect which is being addressed right now (by Eric B) is development work for OO.o

A project has at least 3 kinds of participants in a "community" : creators, consumers and critics. The objective is to use the constructive feedback of the last group along with the enthusiasm of the second to increase the tribe of the first. Sometime back there had been a singular post about Campus Representatives for OO.o. SUN already has a Campus Representative Program for Solaris / OpenSolaris and it is a good way to increase the outreach into the diverse cultures and processes of education that we have across the globe. A CR would be a person who can motivate, coach, guide potential creators / contributors towards appropriate mentors within the Education Project. Additionally, a CR should also be someone who can create, sustain and encourage local communities in the local area. It would be impossible for the Education Project to reach out to all possible places unless there are bonds with community leaders already strongly forged.

To ensure that CRs have things to talk about, there is a requirement to put in place:

+ more development tasks in addition to the ones already put on the wiki

- development tasks which have a resonance locally in addition to being valuable for OO.o project as a whole (the IndLinux project has been talking about doing things around enchant and spell checkers)

+ an increased participation and collaboration between existing incubator and recognized projects within OO.o when it comes to this project

+ "classrooms" for contributors on a regular schedule from developers within OO.o projects

- providing potential contributors with content, lessons, HowTo and mentoring them towards producing code

All of the above will require much more than the few of us in the Education Project. It will require some bit of help from SUN - towards creating the charter for Campus Representatives and participation of its developers.

OO.o is not part of GSoC and was not part of GHOP, so there's a chance that we will lose out on a substantial part of the student population who wish to contribute to a FOSS project. This would require that the visibility of the Education Project as a single window towards getting mentoring for contribution to various OO.o projects, be increased in a much larger quantum now. That can happen via blogs, talks, presentations, content on wiki.

The way I see it, as on date we have a numerous good ideas. But not much in terms of actual proposals eg. wants to coach xy students in . Unless we have proposals, the fear I have is that we might end up building a community for which we don't have anything to offer.

Before OO.o Conference at Beijing, we need to target getting in place:

+ classrooms (starting April at least 3 a month)

+ a much more richer task list

+ Campus Representative Program (at least 50 CRs)

I am proposing that we keep the focus on creating curricula on the back-burner for the moment.

Thoughts, feedback and criticisms appreciated and welcome

Education Project and welcome new students

Today, George Armah, student at Lafayette College of Easton (Pennsylvania), joined the #ooo_macport IRC channel, because he wanted to propose ideas for a potential Google SoC application.

After a short discussion about what George had in mind to make Aqua version more Mac like, I proposed him the right people to be contacted.

Afterwards, we continued to discuss a bit, and the usual problem appeared:

- lost on the wiki ...
- whom ask ?
- who does what ...
- how start progressively for Mac OS X port (works for any other port )

After all these (normal) questions, I explained there is Education Project, and presented the existing Education Project effort, including the spirit of the task.

Glad to see George enjoyed :)

I hope to see more students joining, but don't forget, teachers are welcome too ;-)

Implement a new Canvas on Mac OS X

Thanks to Thorsten Behrens, from Novell, who updated the information in new canvas implementation using Core Graphic on Mac OS X .

Just my imagination, but this application, belonging to Education Project effort, could become a nice Google Summer of Code too.

Our role is to accompany the peers teacher/student in the OpenOffice.org Project discovery.

Are you student, and interested to join ?

IRC :
server irc.freenode.net
channel #education.openoffice.org

Mailing list. dev@education.openoffice.org is the good one (please subscribe before)

You want to discover Education Project ? => read our Welcome !

Education Project Effort

An effort (thanks to the UNO Team for the definition) consists of the following things:

* a goal or a mission,
* to solve a problem,
* while using a solution,
* optionally having a time plan,
* a list of things which need to be done, these may directly be some content (e.g. specifications, implementations, tests, articles) or other efforts, and
* a status (e.g. planned, in progress, finished, cancelled).


To discover new developers and build a bridge between OpenOffice.org Project and Educational System, OpenOffice.org Education Project proposes applications, doable in one or two month of work for a student ( time to discover everything, and do the real work). All these applications below are correlated with IssueZilla issues, and need new code to be solved.

What we propose is to accompany the peers teachers/students solving the issues: the work must be done by the student, and we are resources. This means, most of the time, we have no clue about the solution (but we could work on it), or the needed changes, and sometimes, just a little change in the code can solve the issue. Sometimes, a lot of code can be needed.

The most important is to work together, and make the students discover OpenOffice.org source code and organisation.

The applications are classed

- by difficulty level (more stars means means more work and more difficult to be solved )

- by themes, e.g. Mac OS X


For further information, please look Education Project Effort



Want to contact us ?

IRC :
serveur irc.freenode.net
channel #education.openoffice.org

Mailing list. dev@education.openoffice.org is the good one (please subscribe before)

You want to discover Education Project ? => read our Welcome !

Virtual Classrooms and the Education Project

Over the last two weekly IRC meetings (I could not attend yesterday's but read the scrollback) we have been discussing about setting up IRC "Classrooms".

This is about putting in place a defined and regular timetable when developers can hold "classes" in the virtual world of interwebs and IRC and generate contributions towards their projects. Using mailing lists or IRC for classrooms is not an unique phenomenon by any means. If I recall well, LinuxChix has a "Courses" mailing list and Ubuntu (via Ubuntu Women ?) have IRC classrooms on packaging and the like.

The main idea is to: [i] ensure that there is a scheduled contact with the developers and [ii] create content that can be re-used in the larger context of making a curricula for OpenOffice.org

So, once we have the classroom topic along with an abstract (if possible), the developer would be putting across the intended audience and the required reading before attending the class. If we have a slide deck ready that would really help towards getting a real "classroom" going (moderating the IRC channel means no questions save those asked to the moderator/operators and thus no random chatter). The classroom is not intended to "teach" how to begin coding. But, the classrooms are intended to allow the developer to coach-mentor potential contributors to OpenOffice.org.

Once we do have a fair amount of interested teachers, we would be going public with the plans and program of this. But ideally we should kick off the project before February ends.

Math baseline alignment

I had a very interesting and productive meeting this morning with Matthias Bauer and Thomas Lange (I'd like to say thank you), about find a solution for issue 972.

The log of the meeting is available on the wiki, and I'll work on a solution.

More information will be added during the today's IRC meeting (if enough people attend)

Todo: write a little roadmap