Idea: Fedora to Schools

[Jiri Eischmann]

Hi,
I've got an idea I'd like to propose to other ambassadors. I think
someone has already brought this idea up in the mailing list while ago
and we discussed it quite thoroughly at the EMEA FAD ten days ago.

Educational organizations is an area we should focus on a lot and
students and teachers should be one of our main target audiences. I
think reasons are pretty obvious: school time is usually when people
choose their area of interest in IT. Who of us didn't start with Linux
and open source at high school or university? What students interact
with and learn at school is what they tend to use in their lives.
Students is probably the biggest source of new contributors.
Therefore Fedora should be there.

What would be the goal of this initiative:
Making Fedora more visible at schools, helping teachers and students and
making it easier for them to start using Fedora and leverage all its
advantages.

What is this idea not about:
It's not about reviving Fedora Education Spin and Education SIG. The
goal is not about creating a special version of Fedora for schools. It
should be rather about teaching them how to use the stock Fedora (or the
Fedora.Next products in the future) for their school tasks.

Because I know projects with big goals die even before they start, I'd
like to break it down into several levels we can achieve:

1. creating a list of ambassadors that work/study or just close to
universities (I would start with just universities because high or even
basic schools are a large target, however I wouldn't explicitly exclude
them) and are willing to help students and teachers to start with
Fedora, help deploy it. Some kind of campus ambassadors. People then can
easily look up if there is any representative of Fedora Project at their
university who can help them.

2. Creating and executing agenda for such ambassadors. There are many
ways to promote Fedora at schools. Here are some examples from my
experience:
We go to universities to introduce Fedora to students. For example, one
teacher of Brno University of Technology invites us every year to
introduce Fedora to his students in Introduction to Programming because
he wants them to do their homeworks in C in Linux and many of them don't
have an experience with Linux at all and such introduction is very
informative for them. It's also a huge opportunity for us to get new
users and eventually contributors because the presentation is attended
by over 500 students. It would great to build such relationships and do
such presentations at more universities.

Last Friday, we organized an open source day for talented high school
students (part of a larger project for talented students). We spoke
about FLOSS in general, but then we picked Fedora Project as an example
and introduced it to them and everyone got a flash drive with F20. A few
days later, we received a message from one of the students that he spoke
with their school admin and they would deploy Fedora in one of their
labs and if it works they would convert the rest of the school. So again
a small event, but a big opportunity.

3. Sharing best practises how to promote Fedora at universities,
creating documentation about deploying Fedora in such environment and
using it in education. We have great projects we can offer to them. I've
already spoken with several teachers and they for example like the idea
of DevAssistant and it could really help them in their courses.

4. Working with other teams within Fedora Project to make sure that
Fedora is suitable for usage in educational environment and maybe
reviving Education Spin if we find it useful.

I know it looks like a large project, but we don't have to implement
everything I've written in this email. As I said we can start with a
small scope.
I would just like to know your feedback. If you find such a project
interesting and beneficial for us and you might be able to help because
nothing gets done by itself.

Jiri