blog/data/2012-11-14-skolelinux-angela-fuss.txt

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