[Fsedu-developers] Getting the show on the road

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

FSEDU has been moving rather slowly. Probably because many people believe Forum
is an absolute requirment for it. For the record it isn't. Forum is just the
combination of chatting and something else, nothing big or anything. For the
time being we could perfectly replace Forum using IRC.

Another problematic matter is the lack of concrete stuff. We have nice ideas,
but little content. I will propose a number of concrete subprojects further down
this mail. 

An important decision to make is our approach to schools. I highly second the
motion that we should not use some Open Source arguments since they invalidate
the Free Software ones. I mean the arguments that implicetely asume that there
is something like intellectual property and those that implicitely asume that
it's acceptable to sell or distribute software without giving the recipient the
Four Freedoms of Software. With other Open Source arguments we need to clearly
explain how they are caused by the Four Freedoms (changing them to Free Software
arguments), for example the increased development speed of Free Software is due
to the users having the freedom to change the code and to share it.

Our philosophy is so important that we need to write it down, clearly and
powerful, without resorting to weak arguments that empower our enemies. One
document will evolve out of this: the Philosophy file, which will be included in
every FSEDU publication of a given size. The file will be a about the size of a
book chapter, giving an introduction to Free Software, why Free Software is
important in education, what the difference with Open Source is and where to
find more information about Free Software.

Currently the only subproject is FSA, which contains currently too many stuff
however. FSA should be purely about creating an online Free Software Academy, as
such it's the only part of FSEDU that's really Forum dependant btw. At the
moment the first attempts in book writing are also in FSA. And if nothing
changes the certification stuff will also be in the FSA. Book Writing and
Certification are also of importance to normal schools however and as such
deserve their own subprojects.

For Book Writing we will need to set a number of conventions. My personal belief
is that the books are best written in TeXmacs, due to it's closeness to LaTeX
and it's WYSIWIG interface. Any objections to making that a rule? If the former
is approved we will need to set a number of conventions to make every book look
the same (the LaTeX conventions are a little confusing). It would also be nice
to have some script to automatically syntax markup code in the book, does
anybody know if such scripts exist and if so where?

For Certification we will need a large Certification Commision with some
experienced members (read teachers) in it and some less experienced ones too
(for debugging). The Commision will:
a) Create specifications about the knowledge a student needs to have to get the
certificate.
b) Create example exams.
c) Check exams to see if they live up to the specifications.
The actual certification of students will be done by companies that get their
certificates from FSEDU. This will be our primary source of income.

Both Book Writing and Certification are tied up with the Curriculum subproject.
The Curriculum is the collection of all our courses. Note that we will offer
courses in all areas of Computer Science, including for example Discrete Math.
This is due to the FSA that needs a complete Curriculum. Also in almost any
class properietary software is used, and since we don't really like propietary
software we will need a complete Curriculum to get it out of the schools. Note
that I'm willing to take the lead of this subproject (/me loves inventing
courses :-). I will explain the Curriculum in another mail.

Greetings,

Peter