Free Software Collaboration
From Schoolforge-UK
Contents |
Project Goals
The free software collaboration project aims to provide a central point for schools to identify software needs and get opensource software developed.
Why
Following from the comment Richard Rothwell made in relation to a recent BECTA report on TCO:
"If a dozen schools want something, for the cost of licensing the software, they could probably have it written,"
Although schools are well within their right to do this, I think that if Schoolforge-UK acted as a central point, the software will be developed with the educational community in mind. This not only saves on multiple schools having similar software being written on multiple times, but the educational community will ensure that OSS requirements are actioned.
It will also help bring geographically distributed schools together with a similar development requirement.
The Projects
- Schools collaborate to identify OSS requirements, this could be OSS that does not exist yet or existing OSS that is lacking the full potential it could have for education establishments.
- Students use the requirements of OSS needed by schools as projects for their qualifications.
- From the creation and use of OSS, documented deployments are noted here on Schoolforge-UK
Whats needed then?
- Schools to identify OSS needed and briefly document their requirements.
- Schools to identify OSS that they believe is lacking key functionality that they need.
- Programmers - This can be self employed, students, anyone who can write OSS that can follow our requirements.
- any opinions of amendments.
- A forum for the projects to be actioned on.
- A method for coordinating funding.
See discussion page Talk:Free_Software_Collaboration to see how to use the google group or just go to Google Groups - SF Software Collaboration
