Update: I just found that posting comments was not possible, quickly switched to standard theme to make this possible…
Been a while since i last blogged; quite a while actually! Yet there’s not been too much to say, nothing of interest from a KDE point of view, and nothing i consider worth being made public.
However, there is things going on recently that i think are of interest. I was in Dornbirn last Saturday, attending the annual “LinuxDay”, where i and Stievi (thanks, it wouldn’t have been possible without you!) had a KDE booth and i gave a talk on KDE – one heavily influenced by our latest development in combination with the questions i was asked before, but this is not about that. The reason for me to clean up my wordpress comment queue and write something is something else:
One thing i am fighting for here locally is making schools and people responsible of education aware of the possibilities, value and chances of using FOSS, especially of course KDE. It is extremely tedious and time consuming to make contact with teachers and headmasters, explain that this is not something “just we” (as the FOSS community) profit from and actually raise awareness here.
Now let me explain my thoughts before getting to the point (or just skip the next few paragraphs and go to the last one if you like):
When looking back at what i did in school – especially computer science classes – i remember learning basically interesting things (i was lucky not to be taught MS Office but rather Pascal, C, x86 Assembler, Ethernet and TCP/IP, …) and then creating “example implementations”, useless from the beginning and thrown away once finished (what else does one want to do with an ethernet based chat programm with its very own protocol??). I was extremely motivated, yet some just couldn’t find a reason to do all this. Most of my friends actually… Now if we would have done something “useful” inside a “real” project, things would have been different – motivated students, “help” for teachers (from members inside the community), work that’d actually be of value and duration (which again directly translates to motivation!). The gained knowledge would excede the work itself, students would learn to communicate inside the community, use different tools, work together, … you name it. Besides, getting out of school having more than a stupid “European Computer Driver’s License” in hands “might” be of value too some time in the future. So no doubt, it’d be a win for the students.
The teachers are hardest to convince: they usually have their program set years ago, teaching the very same things year and year again, something new would involve work they’d themselves wouldn’t even be familiar with. We – as a community – must be open to help here! They will act as proxies to the students, so “teaching” on teacher will get this knowledge to 20 or more students! However, once they’re over this learning curve and adopted classes, things will be rewarding for them too: motivated students are easier to teach; motivated students will develop their own “drive” in the project (i’m sure there’s always 3 or 4 who will, things never apply to “everybody”, but those few will be helpful inside class). Yet admittedly the teacher’s benefit is the smallest, how can we change that?
Finally, there’s the community, there’s KDE, there’s us. Basically that’d mean a whole lot of new “contributors”: students doing translatons, writing plasma applets, writing features and plugins, small projects (these projects have to be finishable within 8 months!). Most of them will leave after this, but not leave without at least having heard of and used FOSS. Some though will stay and continue contribution. At this point there won’t be a “them” or “us”, there’ll be “us”. Great! One thing that has to be thought of though is how we deal with orphaned code, or better not to end up with it, but also teach them “maintainence”.
I think the benefits are very obvious, the shortcomings are solvable, in the end it’ll be a “win-win” situation. Now the reason why i came up with this now (and believe me, there’s quite a bunch of emails i wrote in the last months that discuss just that with teachers and students) is, that this is not just a dream. The reason why, when informed about the event in Dornbirn, i immediately agreed to go there and give the talk was just that! The event is a tight cooperation between the local LUG Vorarlberg and the HTL Dornbirn, a technical school. Right next to KDE, GNOME, Fedora, OLPC or OpenOffice there were students presenting their little projects, and these weren’t bad either! Multimedia streaming, mathematical and scientific applications, really ambitious stuff, either just utilizing FOSS or even altering it. These very students then have a chance to get in touch with the projects they’re using, see the latest development, but not just consuming it all, but actually “being stars” themselves, presenting their work at booths and presentations!
Now think of having just two teachers in your hometown doing this, you helping out in the beginning a bit. Then imagine just 2 of their students stay with their work and become regular contributors. Every year. And there’s 40 more who have heard of and worked with KDE. And what we do is what we always do when getting new contributors. Yet everybody will gain…
<deam> an event like linuxday is one way to reward their work; one thing i’d love to see some day is, when having some developers in a place, is organising a “conference” (one afternoon of talks in a public room, with talks from “real” KDE folks) where these students have a chance to present their work! It’s less about it being technically necessary, it’s more about motivation and rewarding! </dream>
<dream> If you are a student and want to do more than these pointless trainings-apps, think of proposing FOSS in class yourself! Show interest and help your teacher(s) with it! You are community, remember… </dream>