Edubuntu and beyond

[Richard JOHNSON]

Hey everyone!

First off, congratulations to the new Edubuntu Council. I look forward to
working with each and everyone of you in making Edubuntu the greatest
educational distribution available.

A quick intro about myself for those of you who may not be familiar with
me. I have been a member of the Ubuntu community since 2005. I have mainly
focused my work on Kubuntu development as well as community development. I
have helped a little here-and-there with Edubuntu in the past, mainly with
documentation as well as authoring the Edubuntu chapter in the Official
Ubuntu Book. In addition to the Edubuntu Council, I am also a member of the
Community Council, MOTU Council, and the Regional Membership boards. I am a
MOTU and Core Developer. So with my background in the Ubuntu world, I hope
that I am able to reach any and all goals that the wonderful Edubuntu team
creates!

So now, Edubuntu and beyond. One thing I would like to set as a goal is to
make Edubuntu as popular as Kubuntu has become. This would of course be a
short-term goal, as I would like Edubuntu and Kubuntu to be #1, along side
of Ubuntu. One thing I feel I helped Kubuntu with is getting it out there
and making people want to develop the future of it, and I hope to do the
same with Edubuntu. As many of us know, Edubuntu has been a fairly large
project with a relatively small community of developers and contributors. I
would love to help change this, and look forward to any ideas you all may
have.

I have recently gone through the wiki.ubuntu.com/Edubuntu and noticed that
it is a bit incomplete as well as a bit out-of-date. Maybe one thing we can
look at is a "Edubuntu Docs/Wiki Day" where we can hopefully get some
people from inside and outside of the Edubuntu community contributing. One
thing I would definitely like to see is a Edubuntu/Todo page for Lucid to
track work which can also be tracked by the Desktop Team [1]. We can borrow
the layout from Kubuntu/Todo/Lucid, and I would be happy to get that going
if everyone agrees on it.

I know I may reference Kubuntu quite a bit, and hopefully many of you don't
hold that against me :p  The reason I do so is because Kubuntu was the same
as Edubuntu just a year or so ago. We had this amazing product but we had a
small developer and contributor community, and as many of you probably
heard, Kubuntu regularly fell behind what Ubuntu was doing. I would love to
prevent this same thing from happening to Edubuntu, even though it already
has a bit.

One thing we have going for us is our upstreams. There is plenty of work
being done upstream for the educational market that Edubuntu already
leverages. I am also a KDE developer, and regularly follow what the KDE
Educational group is doing. I know on a few occasions they really wanted to
see Edubuntu flourish as well, and they are great fans of it. I helped a
bit with this when I created the edubuntu-desktop-kde metapackage a couple
of years ago. Now what is going on with the GNOME side I am not to up on,
but I am sure some of you already are. Let's take a look and see how the
futures of our upstreams are looking, take a look at other educational
distributions, and see where we can be better. We already have LTSP and
that seems to be a very large factor in the Edubuntu adoption, now lets
make the rest of Edubuntu just as shiny!

Once again, thanks to the support, and I do look forward to working with
each and everyone of you. If there is anything you think I can help with,
please do not hesitate to ask me. If I can't help or don't know the answer,
I know many more who just might be able to help or answer. Thanks!

-- 
 Name|  Richard JOHNSON
Title|  Developer
  WWW|  http://www.ubuntu.com
Email|  nixternal at ubuntu.com
GnuPG|  3578 0981 A21D D662 2A96  7623 F4C1 838C D8C4 4738
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