UK FS and OSS initiatives

From Schoolforge-UK

There have been several attempts at getting a free software/Open Source Software GROUP specific to education in the UK. It is important to consider these attempts and see what was good/bad about them, and (probably even more important) to see what has happened to them.

UK Schools Howto document: This was being written as a prelude to forming a 'schools LUG'. It never really got beyond an initial draft stage. It was thought this could be soaked up by the OSiE stuff (see below). There are now many international sites that contain the sort of information planned for the UK schools howto (although nothing UK specific). See http://www.northants.lug.org.uk/projects/schools/

Open Source in Education: This started well with a face-to-face meeting in Salisbury (Mar 2001) between a fair number of people FROM the SuSE UK Schools email list. Eventually it spawned a web site and set of mailing lists. Unfortunately, they could never get the support of the major Linux vendors in the UK, and never succeeded in moving subscribers over FROM the SuSE list. It eventually died out FROM lack of contributions.

UKUUG Education Special Interest Group: The UK Unix Users Group have been planning a GROUP specifically interested in education. Anyone any info?

National Computer Centre: The NCC have had various studies and a web forum, which involved several key people FROM UK Linux Users Groups. This was not specific to education, but does consider free software use for UK businesses, etc. After the publication of an initial paper, discussions have somewhat died out.

Becta: have tinkered with free software FROM time to time, again including publishing a [paper | http://www.royallatin.bucks.sch.uk/opensource.pdf ] about its use. (Actually, the paper is about "open source" according to their own definition of the term. All free software meets their definition, I think, but not all of their "open source" is [free software] or OSI "open source". I have heard that BECTA are dropping their odd definition in favour of the Office of the e-Envoy one, so won't be updating that paper to fix any bugs. -- [MjR]) There was a weblog site too - I think this was a Becta thing - http://www.ose.org.uk/. They have an Educational Software Database at http://besd.becta.org.uk/index.php3 which lists software running under Linux that fits in with the National Curriculum.

International Efforts: There have been a whole host of international websites/initiatives spring up in the last 3 or 4 years. Thankfully these days, most surviving initiatives now come under the banner of SchoolForge.

The lessons? Not sure, but some could be:

• Remember it is easy to create a website and some mailing lists, but much harder to get backing FROM the community
• There are sure to be other groups considering free software in education. If anyone knows about them, please help us get in touch by adding links to this site.
• The best-established forum still appears to be the SuSE UK Schools email list. Is this a case of 'if it ain't broke' maybe?
• It is hard to get real education professionals involved as many are already overworked and don't have much time to experiment.