Edubuntu Revival

[Erich Eickmeyer]

Greetings Technical Board!

My wife (Amy) and I attended Ubuntu Summit in Prague and she felt very
inspired by many of the talks in terms of advocacy and education.

She was a little disappointed, however, that the education flavor
(Edubuntu) was no longer around. For some background, she's a 15+ year
early childhood educator, and works for a non-profit here in the United
States that is a resource for refugee children from Somalia. As you can
imagine, Ubuntu is a very strong concept for this organization.

With that, after much discussion, we have decided that, as a couple, we
would like to revive Edubuntu with Amy as the flavor lead and myself as
the technical lead/MOTU. Luckily, much of the old pieces of the puzzle are 
already in place, so it's somewhat of a matter of getting access to those 
pieces, and then re-establishing the flavor.

We have been added to the Edubuntu Council team
(https://launchpad.net/~edubuntu-council) as administrators, which meets the 
requirements of establishing an owning team.  However, you'll notice that this 
team owns nothing. We need to establish ownership of the Edubuntu
Developers team (https://launchpad.net/~edubuntu-dev) which is
currently owned by a dummy owner owned by the technical board.
Therefore, our next steps, we believe, are the following, and correct me if 
I'm wrong:

1) Establish Edubuntu Council as owners over https://launchpad.net/~edubuntu-dev which would give us access to the packaging repositories.
2) Gain access to the seed at https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/
ubuntu-seeds/+git/edubuntu, which I believe would actually require forking the 
seed? Basically, it would be silly to have to constantly throw pull requests 
here.
3) Work on the seed and line it up with Amy's vision
4) Re-establish it as an official flavor

The vision so far is to keep the GNOME desktop and partner with the Desktop 
Team, providing any assistance there as needed. It would install every 
edubuntu-* metapackage by default, but also have a tool similar to Ubuntu 
Studio in that it would also have a meta uninstaller so the system could be 
customized to not have the tools that it doesn't need for a particular age 
group (i.e. early learning doesn't need algebraic tools, etc.). Likewise, 
there would also be a tool similar to ubuntustudio-installer that would allow 
the metas to be installed on all flavors. However, the advantage of having an 
all-in-one .iso image is that it saves time during installation and is easier 
in areas with slow or no internet, and would also contain a few special 
"customizations" for education (logos, wallpapers, etc.).

I hope we can reestablish Edubuntu as Amy has a wonderful vision
for the project, and I know this was one of Ubuntu's general goals in
the past.

-- 
Erich Eickmeyer
Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio
Ubuntu MOTU