At the beginning of 2010, it's the perfect time for reflecting on the past year and make wishes for the new one so here I go with my analysis of KDE-Edu.
Recent past
In 2008 and 2009, things were slow: I was busy with my family and the 6 months release scheme did not allow me enough time to really get into a realease. Several KDE-Edu developers also slowed down at the same time, mainly also due to family life (several became new fathers, congratulations!) Since December 2007 I had no time to organize another meeting. The project still lived quite well on the development side: new developers joined, we'll release two new applications in 4.4 (Cantor and Rocs) and while some programs are unmaintained they are nevertheless working properly enough to be released.
It is difficult to form a community because the KDE-Edu developers have a very vague common goal (Free Education Software build with KDE) unlike Amarok or KDevelop teams which only have one product as a goal or unlike Plasma team (where people appropriate freely other people code to improve it for example). Some KDE-Edu sub-teams are small communities on their own like Marble team.
Now
A few things are happening right now and the combination of them gives a new energy to the project:
- Lydia Pintscher (nightrose) stepped in and did several things. She is organizing monthly IRC meetings. She listed orphaned applications and will try to get new developers for them. She is trying to get promotion on Edu apps via blogs and videos. She is coordinating with the Multimedia people to have KDE-Edu in a quite big meeting in May 2010. She set up an online survey to get user feedback to help us get directions for the future. She is thus working both on KDE-Edu internal communication and opening us to the larger KDE community.
- Sabine Emmy Eller from Vox Humanitatis is using Parley and KHangMan in real life with less resourced languages and started to share languages files with us.
- KHotNewStuff and Open Collaboration Services are making file sharing a reality, that invoves some KDE-Edu developers and some test apps.
2010
So after some slower months KDE-Edu is regaining vitality and for 2010 several things are planned:
* KDE-Edu internals
- development: more use of libraries (sharing code between KAlgebra and KmPlot for example)
- file sharing: OCS. Generalization of GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff) features in a standard way using kde-files.org
- meeting in May in Switzerland with other KDE teams:
* Things to think of maybe in coordination with distributions (ideas): data tarball for non connected people, KDE use in networks (thin clients, ...)
* Things to work on in coordination with KDE
- website, branding, promotion
- docs, tutorials, UserBase
- KDE-Edu on small devices: more and more schools are using their website to put content for pupils accessing it with their smart phones
- Educational Plasma Activity and "kiosk" desktop * Meeting in May 2010 organized by the Ma* people (Mario, Markey and Mamarok ;-): a new impulse, a way to integrate new people, discovering other KDE technologies we do not implement so well, being part of the project, getting real life users meeting with us (Vox Humanitatis)
* Akademy 2010: let's see how to make some impact here!
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Special thanks to Lydia for her efforts in getting us as an active team again!
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PS: don't try to steal nightrose for your own project away from us!
Thanks to all the people having taken the survey. If you feel like you want to help KDE-Edu in any way, please feel free to contact me and you'll never regret it! If you're a distribution person related to Edu and feels you have ideas and feedback to share, please join the meeting!
Orphaned edu apps: KTouch, KBruch, Kiten
7 comments:
When GHNS becomes a reality for the vocabulary training application I will take some time and create a set of training sessions for swedish-english. I missed having pre-made sets when I wanted to learn esperanto so I figured I could step up and provide the most simple basics in swedish-english. hopefully, someone else will fill up with more after that :)
Thanks for posting such a great summary. I am coming out of my new baby/new job open source hiatus too, and hope to get Kalzium and chemistry related stuff moving forward again. I am also working on some git migration stuff for our module.
@jonas: upload is already implemented in Parley for 4.4 so you might give it a go!
@marcus: great! i am using git-svn since recently to get myself familiar with git. Hugs to your son and wife!
Hi annma, all the best to kde-edu in 2010 :) Cheers,
Hi annma,
I suggest that the project create a channel of comunication with teachers and schools. Maybe a central site with regional (and localized) "sub-sites" where these people could interact directly with developers and translators. So they could contribute with bug reports and suggestions.
Here in Brazil we have the Software Livre Educacional project (http://sleducacional.org) and would like to colaborate with the "pedagogical size" of the project, if you want so.
Best regards.
KTouch doesn't have mainteiner? That's too bad.
At frederico: yes that's what we should do but we have nobody to actually do it (set up the website, find a server, maintain it,...)
At stephan: yes I hope we'll find a new maintainer soon!
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