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[homepage.git] / blog / draft / 2013-skolelinux-dominik-george.txt

http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg

>  * Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his life
with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a student
in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Information
Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially voluntary) huge
engagement in the open source world, these things are a bit vacant right
now however.

I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium (public
school) for various years now. I took up that work some time around 2005
when still attending that school myself and have continued it until
today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced) network of
that school together with a team of very interested and talented
students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to learn a
lot about open source and networking before I left the school to help
building another school's informational education concept from scratch.

That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids and
the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source ecosystem and
the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.

When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching and
cycling.

>  * How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project?

I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
FrOSCon[0] and visited the project booth. I think I wasn't too
interested back then because I used to have an attitude of disliking
software that does too much stuff on its own. Maybe I was too
unexperienced to realise the upsides of an "out-of-the-box" solution ;).

The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
OpenRheinRuhr[1] 2011 when the BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software
used by my school for various really cool things from timetables and
class contact lsits to lunch ordering, student ID card printing and
project elections first got to a stage where it could have been
published. I asked the Skolelinux guys running the booth if the project
were interested in it and gave a small demonstration, but there wasn't
any real feedback and the guys seemed rather uninterested.

After I left the school where I developed the software, it got mostly
lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!

>  * What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

The most important advantage seems to be that it "just works". After
overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches in the
installer, I got a fully functional, working school network, without the
month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up from scratch in
earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't have any real
hardware at hand, because the school was just founded and has no money
whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main server, terminal
services and workstation) in a VM on my personal notebook, bridging the
LTSP network interface to the ethernet port, and then PXE-booted the
Windows notebooks that were lying around from it. I could use 8 clients
without any performance issues, by using a tiny little VM on a tiny
little notebook. I think that's enough to say that it rocks!

Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no politician
will ever permit a setup described as "Debain, an universal operating
system, with some really cool educational tools" while they will be jsut
fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your school
network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes, this is
unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken too
seriously - you get the idea, anyway).

>  * What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really answer
this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in other
words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I can
list a few points about that:

 - always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
 - be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
 - be helpful at being helpful ;)
 
I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!

>  * Which free software do you use daily?

First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned all
non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this year.

I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly run
text tools. I use mksh[2] as shell, jupp[3] as very advanced text editor
(I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro based
full-featured student management software with the two), mcabber[4] for
XMPP and irssi[5] for IRC. For that overly coloured world called the
WWW, I use iceweasel (Firefox)[6]. Oh, and mutt[7] for e-mail.

However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools are
more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at least
operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to kids. One
of these things is Jappix[8], which I already introduced to some kids
even before they got aware of Facebook, making them see for theirselves
that they do not need Facebook now ;).

>  * Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools
>    to use free software?

Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one side
is what I have experienced.

I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But that
won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives grows
globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced to use
Windows, facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not see why
they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen students take
seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian desktop that could do
anything their Windows at home could do, and they jsut refused to use it
because "Linux sucks". It is something that makes the council of our
city spend around 600000 € to buy software - not including hardware,
mind you - for operating school networks, and for installing a system
that, as has been proved, does not work. For those of you readers who
are good at maths, have you already found out how many lives could have
been saved with that money if we had instead used it to bring education
to parts of the world that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing
less dramatic than plain criminal.

That said, the only feasable way appears to be the bottom up method. We
have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have founded an
association named Teckids here in Germany[9] that does just that. We
organise several events for kids and adolescents in the area of free and
open source software, for example the FrogLabs[10], which share staff
with Teckids and are the youth programme of the Free and Open Source
Software Conference (FrOSCon)[11]. We do a lot more than most other
conferences - this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp
for kids aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids
taking part and learning with and about free software through a whole
weekend. All of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really
exciting.

Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
Skolelinux in the future ;)!

So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.

>  * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?

That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
community. However, I would be willing to do the following:

 - Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
   free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
   of the decision makers above;
 - Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
   knowledge about free software
 
If that is wanted, just let me know ;).

[0] FrOSCon: http://www.froscon.org
[1] OpenRheinRuhr: http://www.openrheinruhr.de
[2] mksh: https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm
[3] jupp: https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm
[4] mcabber: http://mcabber.com/
[5] irssi: http://www.irssi.org/
[6] Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
[7] mutt: http://www.mutt.org/
[8] Jappix: http://jappix.org/
[9] Teckids: https://www.teckids.org
[10] FrogLabs: http://kids.froscon.org
[11] FrOSCon: http://www.froscon.org