Re: [seul-edu] Next step

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 01:44:05PM -0500, Doug Loss wrote:
> to member groups.  The member groups so far are OpenSourceSchools,
> OSEF, LinuxHelpers, RedHat, K12Linux, BlueEDU, and SEUL/edu (have I
> missed any?).  Any of you reading this who represent other Linux in

This is a side issue, but I want to bring it up anyway, because I don't
know the answer.

Take a look at the top of http://k12os.org/. That's already a jumble of
links. I could click on one, but I wouldn't know why I'm picking that
one over another.

Imagine once every project related to Linux in education signed up on
our coalition. There are several hundred of them. Some of the pages
are in English, but some are in Russian, Italian, etc. Some of them
have content that's useful to teachers and students, some of them have
content that's useful to developers, some of them arguably don't have
any useful content at all.

Which ones do we pick for our "shared banner" idea? Clearly not all of
them will fit, even if they were all appropriate.

Now consider the schoolforge.net frontpage. We have a set of 'member
projects'. If it grows long, then we can make a separate page for it.
Do we want to emphasize the high-profile productive ones over the small
ones that we haven't even heard of but who joined the coalition anyway?

Perhaps this could be solved by having only one link ("A member of the
SchoolForge coalition") on sites like k12os.org, and then the frontpage
of schoolforge.net would include a set of links to *resources*, not
sites. So we would link to "Education news" which would pass people to
www.opensourceschools.org, "Mailing list" which would pass people to
seul-edu, etc. If we wanted to maintain the brand names, we might link to
"Educational news at opensourceschools", "Mailing list at seul-edu", etc.

But while we wouldn't have to worry about which coalition members get
"front page space", we wouldn't get to demonstrate that we have buy-in
from all the important Linux-in-education groups. There is also merit
in putting the Big Names on the frontpage in a "they're all in this too"
section. How do we pick them? Do we really want to have a 'core member'
notion, which is a coalition member that carries a lot of weight?

A set of such core members might be:
Debian (Jr), KDE, Linuxforkids, OSEF, OFSET, K12OS, Red Hat, SEUL.
Plus Gnome, Mandrake, SuSE, etc when they realize they should join too.

I realize we should run this thing via common sense as much as possible,
but what happens when it gets too big for that? With Doug's majority
voting thing, a big group of no-name projects could vote themselves onto
the frontpage and vote Red Hat out of the coalition. Obviously we would
take over and "fix" things at that point, but if so, was it ever really
democratic? Or is it really more of a courteous "we promise to listen
to you".

--Roger