local apps, Edubuntu site and community structure

[Joseph Hartman]

Jordan: I think Ace is right about firefox. It seems to work fine for me for
research purposes, especially since I don't install the flash plugin so no
banner ads slow things down. The problems really reveal themselves when a
bunch of students start working with google docs (which uses a lot of AJAX I
think) to save papers/spreadsheets and manipulate images in
presentations/websites and such. I've heard that native Firefox in Linux is
slow altogether, slower even than Firefox in a virtualized Windows OS
running in a Linux system, but I don't know if that's true and that's not
what my primary trouble is. Mostly I have problems with flash and google
apps. Thanks for the offer of help, I'll see how far I can get tomorrow and
if I run into trouble I'll try to have some specific questions for you to
help me with. Cheers!

Ace: I think it could be helpful to have an area on the wiki that told about
different setups schools around the world have done. I know there are some
others on the list who also work at schools and have done what I've done or
better. Uwe **Geercken and Asmo Koskinen both come to mind as I've learned a
lot from their posts to the list. You certainly have my permission to use
any and all of my information.

Scott: when I reflect on my own frustrations with ubuntu and ltsp, I think
they mostly stem from a lack of structure. You say "there has to be *some*
structure, *some* tool that's acting as a gateway." and I completely agree.
The problem I've encountered is that the structure in place is unclear at
best and ambiguous in many cases. Most of the time I think people just have
a problem they want to fix and instead of there being an obvious or even
single destination to get the information or resources they need there are
many different resources of varying complexity. For example, with this
particular issue of local apps, I follow this list, I follow the wiki (which
there are apparently 2 of I learned today?) I follow this thread on ubuntu
forums <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7647569#post7647569>, I
follow a few people's blogs, I randomly google it sometimes, and I can
evidently get on IRC and chat with you. I've never used IRC before but I
could probably figure it out without too much difficulty, but that's a level
of complexity above googling "ltsp local apps ubuntu".

Additionally I think there is a lack of structure organizationally in the
community itself. Until today I thought Gavin was employed by Canonical or
something just because he posts helpful stuff all the time. I've been using
Ubuntu since Dapper Drake and following this list for years, but I'm still a
complete amateur. Meanwhile there are professional Linux developers out
there who might be on the list for the first time today, and there is no way
to differentiate between the two of us. Half the reason I post to
ubuntuforums and my own blog instead of the wiki is because I know I'm
authorized to do so and won't be screwing anything up by adding my own
information.

Perhaps this is just the way things have to be for a community shared
distribution, but it seems to contrast with the way much of the rest of
ubuntu is run, such as launchpad, with it's ability to track users and
statistics and permissions. I'm not too familiar with launchpad, so maybe
I'm wrong and it is as much of a rat's nest as what I'm doing now, but I
know from what I've read about it that it's quite respected in many circles.
I noticed that Stephane Graber was made an "official" developer of Ubuntu or
something in Launchpad recently, and at least that helps to establish a
hierarchy of expertise in the community structure. (Congrats to Stephane
BTW) Ubuntuforums does a good job of this by denoting the number of
contributions each member has made as well as which members are moderators.

In any case, I think it is confusing that in the edubuntu jaunty release
notes <http://www.edubuntu.org/releasenotes/904> it says "Installing Firefox
inside the LTSP chroot and setting *LOCAL_APPS_MENU=True* in lts.conf will
make Firefox to run locally on the thin client. The XDG integration takes
care of adding the application in the menu or replacing it by the local
application if it's already present." but then does not include a hyperlink
or anything to actually direct a reader to a place where they can read more
about how to actually implement local apps.

You ask: "So, once again, what's the solution?  How can we make things
easier?  Ok, lets say we're not going to kick things upstream.  Lets say,
starting right now, Edubuntu, the entity, is going to look at every bug, fix
it, and if upstream needs fixing, we'll spearhead it."

I'm more concerned with documentation than bug fixing and more familiar with
google's tools than I am with forums and wikis, but I'll try to describe
what I would do at my school if I had the problems I've described above:

First I would establish a google site to house all things Ubuntu/Edubuntu
LTSP related and divide the site into sections for each release since many
pages on the wiki apply to one release but not another. Then I would
"invite" all the "developers/experts" on this list, launchpad, or whatever
to be "collaborators" on the site. These collaborators would be able to
change the website pages while all other people would not be able to change
the actual documentation pages, but would be able to leave "comments" at the
bottom of the page to suggest changes for the collaborators to make to the
page, bring attention to outdated/changed information, relate personal
experiences, etc. This would, in my opinion create a hybrid of ubuntuforums
and the wiki where the canon information is in the page while discussions
and experiences about the information on the page took place in the comments
section below.

I would borrow from ubuntuforums' member rating graphic setup to distinguish
between experts and noobs or, since google can't do this, I would require
each member to rate themselves on a scale of 1-20 by answering questions
about how long they've been using ubuntu/ltsp, how many times per week they
post comments to the site, how many hours per week they spend using Linux,
etc. and then put this number in their avatar or username (probably avatar
though since it would have to change over time).

I would install a google talk widget on the homepage and bypass IRC
altogether by allowing visitors to click on the homepage to chat with a
collaborator if one were available. (you can see a google sites example of
this here <http://www.kainoshealth.net/>) Another nice feature of google
sites is that it allows the public to follow changes to any given webpage
within the site via email, just like RSS. Therefore, I would include a
widget on the homepage that automatically highlights recent changes made to
the site so anyone could get site updates via email just by "following" the
homepage.

I would require all collaborators to include information about themselves,
their accomplishments, qualifications, and areas of of expertise in their
profile so that regular lurkers could single out a collaborator for help
with specific issues. I would also give collaborators titles depending on
their tenure so the longest serving collaborators could be easily
recognized. I would divide up the collaborators by last name and assign A-G
last name collaborators to upkeep the area of the site related to one
release, H-N last name collaborators to the next release, and O-Z
collaborators to the release after that.

Finally, I would create two google forms to encourage member participation
in the site. The first form would allow members to submit
ideas/walkthroughs/howtos/experiences in written or video or audio or
screencast or whatever form for the collaborators to review and either
include or exclude from the site. The second form would be a nomination form
for the user to nominate either themselves or another member for
collaborator status.

There's actually a pretty good example of a google
site<http://www.evonypedia.com/>doing much of what I described. (I
don't actually play the game, but I do
subscribe to the Google Apps twitter feed) You'll notice there aren't any
comments at the bottom of any pages, but that's just because they turned
them off.

I don't imagine Canonical is too interested in employing Google for their
support services, but I believe much of what I described is possible with
other FOSS tools like Drupal, (in fact, wasn't launchpad just opensourced
and released?) and as long as the movement is towards more structure both in
terms of the community and the information I think it would go a long ways
towards clarifying where Edubuntu as an entity and community stands in terms
of strengths and weaknesses and would enable more valuable participation by
part-timers and amateurs. -joe
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