So...

[Simon Ruiz]

I've been lurking on here for a few months and although I'm impressed and excited about all the great work you're all doing, there is really nothing going on here that is useful to me or that I can be useful to (the more important issue, IMHO).
 
I love that you're working so hard on bringing computer access to resource-light areas of the world. I am from a third-world country myself (Venezuela), and belong to the national Ubuntu users group there.
 
I've introduced myself before, but let me do that again as it's been a while:
 
My name is Simón Anibal Ruiz Rolfs, and I am the Technology Assistant at Bloomington High School North in Bloomington, Indiana. Some of you may know that the Department of Education in Indiana is moving towards Open Source integration for the purposes of facilitating a 1:1 computing environment in classrooms, an environment that some research points to as having beneficial effects on education. At my high school we have received, through two separate instances of grants from this program, nine 1:1 computing classrooms (279+ workstations) which are required to run Linux.
 
Our existing tech support structure has abandoned this program, and I have become the de facto support for this entire program.
 
I blog at indianalinux.blogspot.com about the experiences I'm having, if you're interested.
 
Anyhow, these workstations are far too beefy to be LTSP clients (that is, it'd be a waste to use them as such), so they all run as desktops. Last year I used Edubuntu on the first batch of computers, and this year as I'm redesigning the system we're using I've honestly started using plain vanilla Ubuntu.
 
In my work, I'm concerned with managing a large network of "modern" desktop computers and integrating them with the existing Windows network. I don't use the LTSP component, and since these computers are in Language Arts (English) classrooms, all the nifty educational packages are just games as far as the teachers are concerned.
 
Since I'm using Ubuntu in an educational setting, flying the Edubuntu flag may seem the obvious answer. As I said, though, the project doesn't really bring anything useful to me, or allow me to bring something useful back to the project.
 
I've stayed on this list in case circumstances change, though, but I figured I've waited long enough and should say something.
 
So, any ideas? How can I be useful to Edubuntu? Or should I just stick with vanilla Ubuntu?
 
Hope this finds you all having a great day!
 
Simón