In this post I want to share what is currently being discussed in the edu-team to get some more feedback to what the edu pages should look like. Please submit any comment or suggestion below, per email to the edu-team or this public etherpad.
The last thing we changed on the pages was the mission statement of the edu-team in 2012, so I guess it’s time for an update. We would like to provide much more background info than we currently do. But the first question is: what info do we currently provide? It turned out that I had no clue on what’s actually already there, but somewhat burried and hidden on fsfe.org.
I’ve started to go through the SVN and look for more edu related content we may not be aware of. I grep’ed the SVN for certain keywords and put the result in an etherpad. Now, we can start to sort and consolidate what we currently have and embed in what we want to have in the future. (Help welcome by the way.)
Tagging edu pages and list them automatically on the main edu page.
It would be nice if we could list every page that is tagged as edu content automatically so we wouldn’t have to keep up with new pages manually. Some pages are already tagged, but not consistently and I have to find out how to generate a neat list of them to integrate them on a page and am already in contact with Hugo who did the new design.
Something similar is already being done with the leaflets, but the leaflets are not advertised on the current edu pages. I would like to include them, automatically as well if possible, but separate from the other listing above.
Team page
Our plan was to set-up the edu-team page similar to the existing country team pages like France or Germany as they show all events and news that are tagged with the corresponding country code.
Edu News feed
I would like to include a Free Software in education news feed, a planet like aggregator which collects our blog entries to the matter. Björn mentioned a way how to convert rss feeds to a static page without the use of javascript which sounds like a nice solution to me. Until this is done, I could create short news entries whenever we publish something relevant in our blogs.
be transparent and inviting
I’d like to make the edu-team work more transparent and most of all more inviting to contributers. Maybe by promoting some of our tasks that wait for someone who picks them up. We could just refer to the ticket system we have been using to collect ideas and tasks. This very bullet point is issue #25 by the way 🙂 The tickets #16 and #19 are good examples for tasks anybody could pick up and complete, don’t you think?
At the same time, I want to encourage people to submit new tasks they deem important to be done. Of course, with our limited resources, we’ll have to focus on what we think is most important and leave the rest to somebody else. Bottom line is: We want to make it easy and clear how to help us and how to get involved.
What else?
- Promote the possibility to edit the wiki pages where we collect all kind of data and texts (#23).
- Promote the possibility to submit edu news for the summaries I’ve been posting and/or to the news feed I mentioned above that needs to be set up. In January I started to ask people using this pad for this among other ways and it was actively being used.
- Provide an easy way for feed-back. Something like “How can we make this page more useful? Please mail your ideas to edu-team@…”
- We want to provide good case studies, samples of good (non-discriminating) policies, sientific material, etc.. Until we have a revised and condensed collection of good resources, we can make use of the links we already have in the wiki.
- Create and provide “target group” specific info/flyers like teachers or advocates.
- Provide good resources where to get more info including practical information (maybe also target group specific as with the leaflets)
I am looking forward to any feed-back. Until then, we’ll start implementing the things above step by step. 🙂 Any help is welcome!