Hi all,
I'm going to share an idea and would love to work a bit on this. It's almost the end of August and School will start soon. If you look into a High School, you will find already some enthusiasts, some people which are curious and eventually a lot of potential future professionals and contributors.
I believe it is important to start building a presence amongst this teenagers and establish a bond with them. We are talking of people from 15 to 18 years old (based on the Portuguese Educational System).
Many of this students already have some interest in coding, networking and other aspects and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of them has already heard about GNU/Linux and Free Software. In fact most of them probably have a laptop sponsored by the governament with dual boot, featuring Caixa Mágica (Mandriva based Portuguese Linux distribution; it started actually as being based on SuSE Linux).
I have some connection I can explore, within the City Hall and also the Director of the local high school is someone I know very well (she was my teacher and we both shared some initiatives in the past). I also know Pedro Piedade, which I believe it is still the coordinator for IT and IT teacher there. I know is all fond of Ubuntu and stuff, but it doesn't matter.
If there is possibility of me, or anyone else, or even me and other volunteer to give them a small 10 hour crash course on how to jump into openSUSE and explore possibilities with a group of students... Would anyone be interested in developing the contents for a 10 hour event with students ?
Has someone done this before or has anything we can use? Anyone can share some experiences on this field ?
Would you mind that I would make this happen around openSUSE ?
Going further into this and supposing it does happen... We need to take some info out of it... in a way, we need to look into a process that we can evaluate the initiative and gather some feedback. I can make and hand over some questionnaires... This is actually far easier than a market study... but this wouldn't probably be much in the way of 'open source' as the whole process would be depending on me and most likely people wouldn't be able to follow it, just read a report provided by me, which doesn't help.
Thinking on the future, since it has been developed it should also be available for anyone else who wants to try it out or who conducts a similar event. In this case and also using something openSUSE has done in the past, we could probably use LimeSurvey to build the questionaire and then present the results to the community.
This results may be used later to improve.
What would be the steps that one would take inside the openSUSE community to prepare a crash program to present to 'new users' on openSUSE. How would we split the topics and fit them... for example:
- 1 theoretical group -- The open source vision -- Value and Deployment -- The openSUSE values and Community -- the openSUSE resources to the community -- Ramp into openSUSE enrollment - 1 practical group -- Installing openSUSE Linux -- Configuration openSUSE Linux / YaST -- Repository management / info -- Software Groups -- Basic Service Configuration (popular stuff: apache, mysql, postfix, etc)
I might be forgetting things that are important, but this is pretty much a mockup of a potential 'service plan'.
Where physically can we develop such document and such concept so that we can provide it to anyone who wants to make small field initiatives.
If this is developed correctly we can have a good thing here. For example Fedora does this on a more specific conditions, but their enrollment with the Allegeny University has been pretty much a success, and a lot of stuff was created by their students to Fedora 13 in terms of contents. This is not a copy-cat initiative though. This should be a part of a possible 'Ambassador cook book'.
This is just a concept which I am ready to help develop and document for later application. I can also run a test pilot on the field on the local high school or through the City Hall which far more resources.
As always, comments, suggestions and everything else is welcome.
nelson