[K12OSN] Fedora Education Initiative Launch

[Warren Togami]

I met David Trask and Matt Oquist at LinuxWorld Boston last week and we
had a great discussion with a few other Red Hat folks about the current
successes of K12LTSP and ways to improve the software and community
around it.  This is significant because this is the first time we got
other Red Hat people aware of and excited about the K12LTSP project,
which today exposes Fedora to hundreds of schools and countless
thousands of students worldwide.

We came up with some objectives and action items from this meeting to
further the goals of both K12LTSP and the Fedora Project.  I believe
that we have a huge opportunity here to work closer together and better
the software for the education community.

Goals for us on this list are mainly development and administration of
Fedora related education initiatives.  I envision keeping k12osn as
mostly educator end-user support for now, and we can later reorganize
the community infrastructure around K12LTSP when we have a clearer
picture of what it becomes.

Strawman Objectives for the next six months include:
====================================================
- Development discussion related to merging K12LTSP to become an
official supported part of the Fedora Project.  This means that more
contributors will help K12LTSP development goals.
- Perhaps K12LTSP can be a "mode" to enable in the standard Fedora.
- Eventually convert K12LTSP to use the Muekow framework.  Muekow
potentially aligns with the basic building block goals of the Fedora
Stateless project, so hopefully we can combine resources from multiple
Fedora projects and achieve this by FC6 in a clean and Fedora supported way.
- Collaborate on Samba and LDAP related integration possibly with Fedora
Directory Server in order to achieve out-of-the-box centralized
authentication between mixed platform school networks (Linux, Mac, Windows).
- Plan Fedora's involvement in Open Source in Education conferences
coming up, like the ones in ME and NH during June and July.
- Reorganize the community to better support educators in the use of
K12LTSP.
- Design messaging for the promotion of the K12LTSP model.
- Write more documentation to promote the K12LTSP model, and make it
easier to setup a K12LTSP lab.
- Professional production of an educational documentary video
demonstrating the success of the K12LTSP model.  A well made video would
make it easier for LUG's worldwide to convince schools to try K12LTSP.

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-education-list
Please share your ideas, comments, or questions here on
fedora-education-list.

http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html
K12LTSP Home Page

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com