- <title>Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
-href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
-if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
-After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
-the people behind the German
-"<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
-project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
-welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
-Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
-two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
-
-<p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
-the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
-Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
-growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
-system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
-in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
-
-<p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
-nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
-that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
-working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
-Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
-relationship management and the communication processes in the
-project.</p>
-
-<p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
-and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
-and a yoga teacher.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
-
-<p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
-Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
-founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
-their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
-newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
-several points where the communication with the schools head or the
-teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
-one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
-between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
-parents.</p>
-
-<p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
-started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
-schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
-Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
-networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
-Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
-Germany.</p>
-
-<p>For information about our school project you can read
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
-interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
-answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
-
-<p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
-and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
-background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
-and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
-something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
-;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
-advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
-works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
-teachers, parents...</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
-Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
-
-<p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
-the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
-marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
-schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
-I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
-
-<p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
-do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
-democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
-and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
-Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
-level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
-different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
-on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
-LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
-my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
-Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
-schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
-that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
-strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
-concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
-kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
-
-<li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
-are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
-beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
-they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
-they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
-needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
-we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
-
-<li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
-co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
-contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
-offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
-
-</ul>
+ <title>"Electronic" paper invoices - using vCard in a QR code</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Here in Norway, electronic invoices are spreading, and the
+<a href="http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-handel/faktura">solution promoted
+by the Norwegian government</a> require that invoices are sent through
+one of the approved facilitators, and it is not possible to send
+electronic invoices without an agreement with one of these
+facilitators. This seem like a needless limitation to be able to
+transfer invoice information between buyers and sellers. My preferred
+solution would be to just transfer the invoice information directly
+between seller and buyer, for example using SMTP, or some HTTP based
+protocol like REST or SOAP. But this might also be overkill, as the
+"electronic" information can be transferred using paper invoices too,
+using a simple bar code. My bar code encoding of choice would be QR
+codes, as this encoding can be read by any smart phone out there. The
+content of the code could be anything, but I would go with
+<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard">the vCard format</a>, as
+it too is supported by a lot of computer equipment these days.</p>
+
+<p>The vCard format support extentions, and the invoice specific
+information can be included using such extentions. For example an
+invoice from SLX Debian Labs (picked because we
+<a href="http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">ask
+for donations to the Debian Edu project</a> and thus have bank account
+information publicly available) for NOK 1000.00 could have these extra
+fields:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
+X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
+X-INVOICE-KID:123412341234
+X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
+X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
+X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
+X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>The X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER field was proposed in a stackoverflow
+answer regarding
+<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10045664/storing-bank-account-in-vcard-file">how
+to put bank account information into a vCard</a>. For payments in
+Norway, either X-INVOICE-KID (payment ID) or X-INVOICE-MSG could be
+used to pass on information to the seller when paying the invoice.</p>
+
+<p>The complete vCard could look like this:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+BEGIN:VCARD
+VERSION:2.1
+ORG:SLX Debian Labs Foundation
+ADR;WORK:;;Gunnar Schjelderups vei 29D;OSLO;;0485;Norway
+URL;WORK:http://www.linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/
+EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:sdl-styret@rt.nuug.no
+REV:20130212T095000Z
+X-INVOICE-NUMBER:1
+X-INVOICE-AMOUNT:NOK1000.00
+X-INVOICE-MSG:Donation to Debian Edu
+X-BANK-ACCOUNT-NUMBER:16040884339
+X-BANK-IBAN-NUMBER:NO8516040884339
+X-BANK-SWIFT-NUMBER:DNBANOKKXXX
+END:VCARD
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>The resulting QR code created using
+<a href="http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/">qrencode</a> would look
+like this, and should be readable (and thus checkable) by any smart
+phone, or for example the <a href="http://zbar.sourceforge.net/">zbar
+bar code reader</a> and feed right into the approval and accounting
+system.</p>
+
+<p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-12-qr-invoice.png"></p>
+
+<p>The extension fields will most likely not show up in any normal
+vCard reader, so those parts would have to go directly into a system
+handling invoices. I am a bit unsure how vCards without name parts
+are handled, but a simple test indicate that this work just fine.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Update 2013-02-12 11:30</strong>: Added KID to the proposal
+based on feedback from Sturle Sunde.</p>