blog/draft/2012-skolelinux-angela-fuss.txt

   1 Title: Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß
   2 Tags: english, debian edu, intervju
   3 Date: 2012-11-13 09:30
   4
   5 <p>After begging for a long time, I finally managed to lure another
   6 one of the people behind the German "IT-Zukunft Schule" project out
   7 from maternity leave to conduct an interview.  I am happy to present
   8 Angela Fuß to you. :)</p>
   9
  10 <p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
  11
  12 <p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
  13 Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
  14 two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
  15
  16 <p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
  17 the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
  18 Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
  19 growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
  20 system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-).  We are also
  21 in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
  22
  23 <p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
  24 nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there.  Besides
  25 that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
  26 working in our own school project
  27 "<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>" in
  28 North Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the
  29 customer relationship management and the communication processes in
  30 the project.</p>
  31
  32 <p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
  33 and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
  34 and a yoga teacher.</p>
  35
  36 <p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
  37 project?</strong></p>
  38
  39 <p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
  40
  41 <p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
  42 Free Software.  At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
  43 founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
  44 their IT environment.  Often when Mike came home from working at the
  45 newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
  46 several points where the communication with the schools head or the
  47 teachers did not work.  So we were clear that he would not work for
  48 one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
  49 between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
  50 parents.</p>
  51
  52 <p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
  53 started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
  54 schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
  55 Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
  56 networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
  57 Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
  58 Germany.</p>
  59
  60 <p>For information about our school project you can read
  61 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
  62 interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
  63
  64 <p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
  65 Edu?</strong></p>
  66
  67 <p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
  68 answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
  69
  70 <p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
  71 and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
  72 background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
  73 and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
  74 something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
  75 ;-). This is of course a user experience.  What I also get as a big
  76 advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
  77 works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
  78 teachers, parents...</p>
  79
  80 <p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
  81 Edu?</strong></p>
  82
  83 <p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
  84 Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
  85
  86 <p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
  87 the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
  88 marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
  89 schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
  90 I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
  91
  92 <p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
  93 do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
  94 democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
  95 and helpful.  I am also missing some kind of contact between the
  96 Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
  97 level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
  98 different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
  99
 100 <p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
 101
 102 <p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
 103 on.  As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
 104 LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
 105 my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
 106
 107 <p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
 108 get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
 109
 110 <p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
 111 Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
 112 schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
 113 that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
 114 strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
 115
 116 <ul>
 117
 118 <li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
 119 concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
 120 kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
 121
 122 <li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
 123 are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
 124 beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
 125 they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
 126 they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
 127 needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
 128 we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
 129
 130 <li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
 131 co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
 132 contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
 133 offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
 134
 135 </ul>
 136
 137 <!--
 138
 139 * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
 140
 141 I think Stefan Makiewicz should be interviewed for your blog. He is
 142 one of the teachers at the first school we are working for in our
 143 school project. He gave us the hint to check Skolelinux / Debian Edu
 144 and is very creative in enrolling people into Free Software.  His mail
 145 address is it@maskiewizc.de
 146
 147 If you have not interviewed Kurt Gramlich already I would suggest to
 148 interview him as well. He is one of the main persons in the Skolelinux
 149 community in Germany and I think he would have to say a lot toyour
 150 questions. His mail address is kurt@skolelinux.de
 151
 152 -->