[Parl-devel] Global vs. local community building

[Franklin Weng]

>
> DebianParl is globally oriented with its ties to Debian, but each
> deployment is likely to be locally oriented - concretely the [Greens/EFA
> pilot] tied to [EPFSUG].
>


> [Greens/EFA pilot]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianParl/GreensEFA
>   "Pilot project about trusted email"
>


> [EPFSUG]: http://epfsug.eu/
>   "European Parliament Free Software User Group"
> How do we balance that?
>


> [Skolelinux] has some similarities with DebianParl - aim was global but
> initially most activities - both development and deployments - happened
> in Norway.  When later activities mushroomed in other countries, ties to
> the local Norwegian community was stronger than those to Debian, and for
> several years both development and usage were largely split into
> Norwegian and German communities. The split was - to some extend -
> caused by language barrier (especially for users) and difference in
> interests (for which partly [I am to blame]), but too many lists for too
> little crowd and leaders' [sloppy nursing] played a part too, and was
> only cleaned up very late, by the always painful process of merging
> lists.
> [Skolelinux]: http://www.skolelinux.org/
>   "complete and free "out of the box" software solution for schools"
> [I am to blame]: I convinced Kurt, the leader of Skolelinux Germany, to
> _not_ use Skolelinux as-is for a large deployment in Rheinland-Pfalz,
> but instead try reimplement it more tightly integrated with Debian.
> Reality turned complex, and we didn't reach intended goal, as indicated
> in this summary of a later reflection by Kurt:
>
> https://blogs.fsfe.org/guido/2012/11/skolelinux-pilot-in-rhineland-palatinate-lessons-learned/
> [sloppy nursing]:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2005/05/msg00017.html
>   "Skolelinux leaders and me discussing which lists to use when"
>
> I would prefer to learn from that, by identifying each activity as
> either global or local, and actively nurse it accordingly.
> Concretely the following issues have come up recently that I have
> noticed as related to this global-local conflict:
>  * hosting of resources (e.g. mailinglists) for a deployment
>  * branding of deployed systems
>
> Hosting
> -------
> DebianParl should ideally - being a Debian sub-project - be hosted
> within Debian.
> Concretely for Greens/EFA pilot there is an issue yet unresolved about
> email address mangling inside the European Parliament, raising the
> question if better to have EPFSUG host a list instead.  Short-term that
> might work fine (depending on stability of those resources), but would
> cause participants of that deployment to be treated as local, not
> global: Users of the Greens/EFA pilot will then hangout at a list
> unlikely to grow beyond users at the European Parliament.
> I find it quite important, for the project in general but also
> concretely for this specific pilot, that users get the largest possible
> potential for synergy - by trying hard(er) to keep global things global.
>
> Branding
> --------
> Should EPFSUG brand laptops deployed in "their hood"?  Should Debian?
> Should the deployment "host" (e.g. Greens/EFA)?
> Ideally I guess all of them should be given the offer of promotion:
> Credit for contribution is commonly the only form of "payment" in
> volunteer projects like this, and this branding is clearly a form of
> crediting participation.
> There's a technical issue, however: Debian is Free Software, so in
> principle is easy to adapt e.g. for branding purposes, but currently
> that comes at a high cost: Debian has no space for rebranding as-is,
> requiring some form of "hacking on top" - i.e. adaptions unsupported by
> Debian and therefore risky for maintenance.
> Deploying e.g. laptops directly to users, with no support staff to
> handle quirks, has a _very_ high demand for smooth maintenance.
> Concretely for the Greens/EFA pilot, I therefore find it wise to do
> little if any branding of the software - and instead make stickers to
> put on the outside case of deployed laptops.
> Siri and I are working on making Debian brandable in a maintainable way.
> Not hardcoded (like Skolelinux with its debian-edu-artwork package) but
> flexible enough for each deployment to dictate its choice of branding
> (within some well-defined limitations).  That work takes time, though -
> one or more years - before it will be available in stable Debian.
>
> Thoughts? Comments?
>  - Jonas


Hi,


To be honest I'm here not to discuss about debian-parl.  But here is a very
interesting topic, about global and local community needs.  Also, in Jonas'
mail above and the discussion between us, we were talking about the same
question:  When we have a target and would like to use Debian as our
solution, should we strictly follow Debian way and fit anything into
Debian, or can we give Debian some "addon", or even "dirty hack" to solve
our problem?

I'm actually more interested in another debian project: debian-edu, or
skolelinux.  I don't know if all parliaments in all countries would have
the same needs or not.  I don't think so.  Anyway, for a project like
skolelinux, there will be definitely the common part and the special part
for education in different countries.  Reviewing the history of debian edu,
I think I can understand why it is not pure enough.

Currently I have no idea about how skoleinux "dirty hacked" debian.
 However AFAIK I know that the Germany community also "dirty hacked"
skolelinux for their needs.  (Correct me if I'm wrong)  In Taiwan, we have
another solution called "ezgo", though mainly used for FOSS promotion, but
also used a lot in computer classroom in schools.  Last year in a
purchasing project ezgo "defeated" Microsoft and became the only operation
system pre-installed in 10,000 computers.  ezgo "dirty hacked" Fedora(2007)
/ ubuntu(2008-2011) / Kubuntu (2012-2013).  We added many, many good
applications / public resources for educations into it.  There are also
some special applications like Anki, PhET, Sankore (electric whiteboard),
wiimode, ... etc.  We used DRBL for deployment.  We wrote some special
applications like restoring the student environment after each class.

There are still some other important problems we need to solve, mainly for
people instead of system itself, however that's why I started to study
debian-edu and skolelinux.  Skolelinux has a good performance in the
computer classroom in Taiwan, however there are still something we need to
customize to fit the environment here, like IP netmask range, font problem,
... etc.

Therefore, go back to the real topic.  We'd like to develop a total
solution for schools in Taiwan, and we're studying skolelinux now.
 However, in Jonas' opinion, we should follow the pure Debian way so that
more debian developers can involve and contribute to our needs.  I love
this thought, just that I wonder if pure blends could satisfy all our needs
or not.

Well, actually I seem not to give any constructive comments to this
problem.  I'd like to hear thoughts and comments from all of you.



Franklin
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