Here is another interview with one of the people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux
-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
-"IT-Zukunft Schule"
-project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
-welcome to Angela FuÃ. :)
-
-
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?
-
-
I fell in love with Mike ;-).
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
For information about our school project you can read
-the
-interview with Mike Gabriel.
-
-
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?
-
-
First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
-answer comes rather from a social point of view.
-
-
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...
-
-
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?
-
-
I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
-Skolelinux / Debian Edu.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
Which free software do you use daily?
-
-
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.
-
-
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-
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:
-
-
-
-- 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.
-
-- 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.
-
-- 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.
-
-
-