'Til All Are One

I am writ­ing this from Dhal­inybuy School in remote Aus­tralia. What’s even more impress­ive is that I am typ­ing this on a production-​​model OLPC XO-1.5!

For those who don’t know yet, in March I star­ted full-​​time as the Tech­nical Co-​​ordinator at One Laptop per Child Aus­tralia. This basic­ally means that I man­age the tech­no­logy sur­round­ing the XO laptops, XS server and so on.

We are in East Arnhem Land, North­ern Ter­rit­ory, this week for OLPC deploy­ments, as well as train­ing in Yir­rkala School and the Yir­rkala Home­lands Learn­ing Centres (HLCs).

There are eight HLCs in all, spread over a wide area. The closest one is close to two hour’s drive away from Yir­rkala, almost entirely on dirt road. Yir­rkala itself is quite remote — about 13 hours drive (again, almost entirely on dirt) from Dar­win. It’s gen­er­ally easier to fly to these loc­a­tions (which takes at least four hops if you’re com­ing from Sydney), espe­cially right now as a trop­ical cyc­lone (which barely missed us a month ago when we were out this way) des­troyed many of the roads.

In col­lab­or­a­tion with the Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Sydney (UWS), and with some assist­ance from the North­ern Ter­rit­ory Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing (NTDET), we have formed teams and spread out over the eight HLCs to work with chil­dren, teach­ers, schools and communities.

I’ll have to go into my work at Yir­rkala School at a later time, but here at the HLCs we have man­aged some impress­ive feats, if I do say so myself! For instance:

• this is to the best of my know­ledge the world’s first deploy­ment of the new XO-1.5 devices, and we’re doing it across all eight HLCs at once
• chil­dren can write in their own lan­guage, as we installed Yolngu Matha fonts
• we have taught teach­ers and stu­dents to cre­ate their own e-​​books using Scratch, using pic­tures they take with the cam­era and con­tent we loaded onto the XOs beforehand

In addi­tion, I worked with Ian Cun­ning­ham from NTDET to pro­duce an inex­pens­ive and simple means to deploy wire­less access points to these remote com­munit­ies. These are Link­sys WRT-​​54GL devices flashed with DD-​​WRT. We con­figured each such that they will just work when plugged in. The HLCs that have satel­lite Inter­net can have their access points man­aged from any­where on the NT Schools network.

I left our setup to the UWS stu­dents (none of whom are tech­nical) on my team, and they were able to suc­cess­fully set up the access point and cre­ate a work­able area for the XOs to be charged.

Most of the HLCs have their elec­tri­city sup­plied entirely by local gen­er­at­ors, which are nor­mally rationed to run at night. Dhal­inybuy school has its own smal­ler gen­er­ator. This is enough for the basics, but insuf­fi­cient for the four desktop PCs that they have. Con­sequently, these com­puters are rarely used, and the teach­ers tell me that they are too dif­fi­cult to man­age any­way. Being bat­tery powered and far more power effi­cient, XOs are far more suitable.

We have suc­cess­fully deployed XOs to every school-​​age child in Dhal­inybuy. I’m still out here, so I don’t yet know the status of the other HLCs. I am, how­ever, con­fid­ent that they are oper­a­tional, given the ease at which we got things going here.

Through the access point, every XO (and hence every child) can col­lab­or­ate and share their activ­it­ies in Sugar. This also facil­it­ates an Inter­net con­nec­tion for all the XOs, through the NT Schools net­work. They are now open to a wider world of inform­a­tion and communication.

I was asked by a journ­al­ist to com­ment on the NSW gov­ern­ment decision to dis­trib­ute Win­dows 7 “mini note­books” across schools. Here’s my reply:

I used to work with satel­lite net­works, provid­ing Inter­net access to
most of NSW before wired broad­band was widely avail­able (and it still
isn’t in a lot of places). We had many rural schools and local
coun­cils as cus­tom­ers. The dif­fi­culties of get­ting com­put­ing and
Inter­net resources to remote areas (with asso­ci­ated infra­struc­ture,
train­ing, etc.) can­not be underestimated.

Firstly examin­ing from a busi­ness per­spect­ive, how is this to be
fun­ded, given that NSW is in a poor fin­an­cial state and the gov­ern­ment
has been axing pro­jects left, right and centre? What altern­at­ives were
con­sidered? How were they eval­u­ated? Was there an open ten­der­ing
process?

What mat­ters most is what we can achieve with this pro­gramme. Simply
throw­ing a com­puter to every stu­dent won’t cut it. There needs to be a
clear plan and set of out­comes defined, as you would have with any
reas­on­able busi­ness arrange­ment. This press release doesn’t touch upon
any of that.

What is the oppor­tun­ity cost of fund­ing this scheme? Could the
resources have been spent on bet­ter facil­it­ies for the chil­dren or
bet­ter teach­ers’ salaries?

The phrase ‘new era’ implies some sort of major change. Has this been
adequately planned for?

Teach­ers have a hard enough time keep­ing up with tech­no­logy. Will they
be given train­ing and con­tin­ued assistance?

How will these devices be integ­rated into cur­ricula? How can they
become effect­ive teach­ing aids and not just expens­ive appendages?

Will the focus be on teach­ing or train­ing? I am a firm believer that
schools should teach chil­dren to be clever and think for them­selves,
cre­at­ing the basis for a flex­ible work­force. They should not simply be
trained to mem­or­ise the func­tions of a par­tic­u­lar ver­sion of a piece
of soft­ware. Rote-​​learning like that will be worth­less when they
gradu­ate and enter the workforce.

Will there be any addi­tional costs required to prop­erly use the
equip­ment? Are classrooms adequately equipped with appro­pri­ate
elec­trical wir­ing and capa­city to charge all of these? What about
net­work con­nectiv­ity? What will it take to main­tain the infra­struc­ture
required for these, includ­ing hard­ware and soft­ware for serv­ers,
routers and so on.

In fact, there is no men­tion of sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture at all. What
are the costs of the entire life cycle of these devices, the soft­ware,
main­ten­ance, infra­struc­ture and so on?

Who will own the note­books? Will stu­dents be free to explore and learn
about their com­puters, or will they be locked down? Can they install
whatever soft­ware they want? Will they be tied to par­tic­u­lar
applic­a­tions and file formats?

There is no men­tion at all of what soft­ware will be installed on these
com­puters. An oper­at­ing sys­tem without applic­a­tions is use­less. Will
the included soft­ware be enough to empower and teach our chil­dren?
Have deals been struck with other soft­ware sup­pli­ers? Will there be
addi­tional costs to acquire the soft­ware for par­tic­u­lar sub­jects? Who
bears this cost — the school sys­tem or parents?

Has open source soft­ware been con­sidered at all? There’s plenty of
open source soft­ware that works hap­pily on top of Win­dows. Microsoft
may have dis­coun­ted Win­dows, but did they include an office suite?
Open­Of­fice would do the job just fine.

Even if you believe the tired-​​old argu­ment that the state MUST
pur­chase Microsoft Office for each and every stu­dent (which works out
to tens of mil­lions of dol­lars), wouldn’t it be bet­ter to choose
Open­Of­fice for free, and spend those mil­lions on new lib­rary books or
hos­pital beds?

I’ll admit that Open­Of­fice isn’t exactly the same thing (it’s bet­ter
in some ways, not as good in oth­ers), but it’s so sim­ilar that it
doesn’t really make a dif­fer­ence. It is worth tens of mil­lions of
dol­lars just to get the Real Thing? Does learn­ing MS Office 2003 in
school really pre­pare you for using Office 2007 (with its com­pletely
new inter­face) once you hit the work­force? Refer to my earlier
com­ments about teach­ing versus training.

Are they includ­ing graph­ics soft­ware for the art and design classes?
Are tax­pay­ers going to have to pay for a copy of Adobe Cre­at­ive Suite
for every­one? How about we save the hun­dreds of dol­lars per stu­dent
and use the GIMP and Ink­s­cape instead? Examples such as these abound,
and there are plenty of other open source applic­a­tions that simply
have no good par­al­lel in the pro­pri­et­ary world.

I find it strange that the country’s largest state would tie the
edu­ca­tion of its chil­dren to a totally unproven oper­at­ing sys­tem. A
smart pur­chaser — espe­cially one pur­chas­ing at such a grand scale -
would wait until the soft­ware had been out for a while and had been
thor­oughly tested by con­sumers around the world. Internal test­ing is
one thing, but you can­not beat real-​​world experience.

A point-​​zero release is sure to have rough edges, and it would have
been far wiser to wait for at least the first ser­vice pack like most
organ­isa­tions do. Can you ima­gine the fury that would have been
unleashed if the NSW Gov­ern­ment had decided to kit out the state with
Win­dows Vista before its release? Sure it soun­ded good before it came
out (“The wow starts now!”), but it lost its lustre very soon after
unveil­ing. Many people today still cling onto Win­dows XP, and oth­ers
have switched to Linux and Mac OS X, in response to Vista’s abysmal
state.

The OLPC Pro­ject has already iden­ti­fied and addressed many of the
issues that may be faced. They have done this through devel­op­ing a
com­bin­a­tion of hard­ware, soft­ware, infra­struc­ture, train­ing,
pro­ced­ures and learn­ing mater­ial. It would be wise to learn from their
experiences.

The whole mini note­book revolu­tion star­ted with Linux. Start­ing with
the OLPC XO laptop, Linux has proven to be a flex­ible and cap­able
oper­at­ing sys­tem suit­able for small devices. Its res­ist­ance to vir­uses
and other net­work nas­ties is legendary. The last thing I’d want is for
my child’s com­puter to get infec­ted and start show­ing kid­die porn.
Anti-​​virus and anti-​​malware soft­ware are band-​​aid solu­tions. I’m not
going to build a castle on a swamp.

Com­mer­cially, devices like the Asus Eee PC could not have exis­ted if
it were not for Linux. It forced Microsoft to actu­ally com­pete for
once, by resur­rect­ing Win­dows XP and slash­ing its price to a more
reas­on­able level.

The press release claims that this scheme is ‘unpar­alleled in
edu­ca­tion glob­ally’. There is con­sid­er­able risk in being first off the
block. I’ve already explained the risks of using an unproven oper­at­ing
sys­tem. It would be more prudent to learn from other large scale
rol­louts in education.

Take the Repub­lic of Mace­do­nia, for example. Des­pite being one of the
poorest nations in Europe, they are the only nation to have one
com­puter per stu­dent. They achieved this through the use of Edubuntu,
a vari­ant of the pop­u­lar Ubuntu GNU/​Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem that is
spe­cially tailored for edu­ca­tion and learn­ing. With that, they got a
vast lib­rary of open source edu­ca­tional soft­ware, which was all
trans­lated into their nat­ive language.

Sim­ilar stor­ies abound in places like Brazil, Rus­sia, India and China.
Col­lect­ively known as the BRIC coun­tries, they are con­sidered to be
the up-​​and-​​coming nations to watch over the next few dec­ades. Their
eco­nom­ies have been grow­ing at break­neck rates, partly because they
have been clever in their invest­ments. These nation states recog­nise
that edu­ca­tion is the key to long-​​term eco­nomic success.

You might say that these coun­tries are poor and that is why they are
choos­ing to use open source soft­ware. It is true that they don’t have
plenty of money to throw around, but does New South Wales? Does
Aus­tralia? Where would you want your tax dol­lars spent?

Donna Ben­jamin roun­ded a small group of us together to write a let­ter to Julia Gil­lard, Deputy Prime Min­is­ter and Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion. The res­ult was widely syn­dic­ated, hope­fully build­ing some mind­share in the pro­cess. The Edu­ca­tion Expo proved to me more than any­thing else that FOSS is quickly becom­ing accept­able to the gen­eral pub­lic — the trick is in how you pro­mote it.

So where to from here? How can we cap­it­al­ise upon the gains we have made?

Per­haps our greatest single weak­ness is the per­ceived lack of pro­fes­sional sup­port. I think OSIA should be doing more to address this (note: I’m not imply­ing that OSIA isn’t tak­ing this ser­i­ously). Here’s an e-​​mail I wrote to the osia-​​discuss mail­ing list (which is unfor­tu­nately subscriber-​​only):

The best thing OSIA can do is fight the pop­u­lar notion that there’s no
pro­fes­sional sup­port avail­able for FOSS. We can beat the TCO and Free­dom
drums as hard as we want, but few organ­isa­tions are will­ing to entrust their
com­put­ing to ‘com­munity’ support.

I man­aged the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo a few weeks ago, and
my impres­sion is that FOSS is on the cusp of main­stream acceptance:

http://​www​.dhanap​a​lan​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​6​/​2​9​/​e​d​u​c​a​t​i​o​n​-​e​x​p​o​-​r​e​p​o​rt/

Schools are cry­ing out for ways to get bet­ter value for their dol­lar, but they
aren’t going to even think about FOSS if they can’t get pro­fes­sional support.

If I run the stand again next year, I’d like to see some involve­ment from
OSIA. At the very least, we should have avail­able some leaf­lets show­ing that
yes indeed there is qual­ity, paid sup­port for FOSS.

Also note that FOSS isn’t Linux. We got the most interest in the
OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for Windows.

On the com­munity side, we can con­tinue to make FOSS more accept­able to school admin­is­tra­tions, bur­eau­crats and politi­cians. Here’s my idea:

My sug­ges­tion is for us to build a Web site focused on open edu­ca­tion in
Aus­tralia. We already have the per­fect vehicle: http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au.
How­ever, at present it’s just a messy wiki more suit­able for our own
brain­storm­ing than for being a public-​​facing resource.

The wiki should of course remain, but I pro­pose that we build a proper,
present­able Web site that is dir­ectly access­ible via the
http://​opene​duca​tion​.org​.au address.

Why do this when we already have http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion? Open Edu­ca­tion
is much big­ger than Linux, and cer­tainly should not be anchored to it. Here’s
a short list of what it can include:

• FOSS
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on servers
• (GNU/)Linux OS — on clients/​desktops
• open stand­ards
• open languages/​libraries/​APIs
• free content/​culture
• open learn­ing
• open cur­riculum

To be hon­est, I fear that we might be only hurt­ing ourselves by tying open
edu­ca­tion to a com­pletely Free com­put­ing envir­on­ment. That might be a worthy
aim, but few insti­tu­tions are going to switch over all in one go. By offer­ing
a migra­tion path (or paths), a school can migrate more com­fort­ably at its own
pace. We ought to be provid­ing real choice, not just a bin­ary ‘with us or
with the terrists’.

FOSS (Fire­fox, Open​Of​fice​.org, Scribus, etc.) can run on oper­at­ing sys­tems
other than Linux. To use the recent Edu­ca­tion Expo as an example, we got a
lot of buy-​​in through the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, a com­pil­a­tion of FOSS for
Windows.

Also note how I split Linux cli­ents from serv­ers. Linux’s place in the server
realm is very solid, but con­vin­cing an insti­tu­tion to accept a Linux cli­ent
solu­tion is tougher. And by ‘cli­ent’, I mean either tra­di­tional desktops or
thin cli­ents. The lat­ter are often cost-​​effective and rep­res­ent a real
strength of Linux, but are often over­looked or even have reg­u­la­tions work­ing
against their adop­tion. On the server side, we have some great edu­ca­tional
tools such as Moodle and LAMS.

Open stand­ards obvi­ously include things like file formats and pro­to­cols, which
will become even more rel­ev­ant as we see more applic­a­tions (pro­pri­et­ary or
oth­er­wise) pick up stand­ard­ised meth­ods of inform­a­tion exchange such as ODF
and PDF. This should also ease the integ­ra­tion of FOSS into pre-​​existing
envir­on­ments. It also can include lan­guages and all things related. Why are
schools still teach­ing Visual Basic when they could be teach­ing Python?

The final three points all link together. Most not­ably, they are not depend­ent
upon tech­no­logy at all. Your aver­age teacher isn’t a tech­no­lo­gist, and
shouldn’t have to be. Know­ledge can be shared and organ­ised openly just like
code. Wiki­pe­dia has proven that great things can be built if ordin­ary people
are given easy to use tools.

Where to from this point? I sug­gest that we work towards get­ting a CMS run­ning
at opene​duca​tion​.org​.au. We’ll have to agree upon a design and the mes­sage
that we want to pur­vey. Con­tent cre­ation should be sep­ar­ate from tech­nical
abil­ity, so the CMS should be simple enough for any­body to contribute.

Here is some inspir­a­tion from the UK:

• http://​www​.openschoolsal​li​ance​.org/
• http://​schoolforge​.org​.uk/

The UK edu­ca­tion sec­tor appears to be much fur­ther ahead of us in terms of
embra­cing open­ness, and I think we can take some les­sons from their efforts.

To cla­rify one thing in the above, I wrote the text for http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion, but I never felt com­fort­able with it being there. So much of open edu­ca­tion has noth­ing to do with Linux and Linux Aus­tralia shouldn’t be divert­ing its focus to dwell on it dir­ectly. With a more inde­pend­ent Web pres­ence (in col­lab­or­a­tion with Linux Aus­tralia), I feel that we can be much more effective.

LotD:   Open sourcing Aus­tralia: OpenAus​tralia​.org goes live

Two weeks ago, we had the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

Here’s my report, as co-​​ordinator of the Linux Aus­tralia stand:

Edu­ca­tion Expo
Sat 14 to Sun 15 June
Rose­hill Race­course, Sydney

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is an annual trades show tar­geted towards the K-​​12 edu­ca­tional space. Vis­it­ors con­sist of fam­il­ies and edu­cat­ors. Linux Aus­tralia once again had a stand, with volun­teers spread­ing the word about free and open source software.

As always, we were very suc­cess­ful. With each passing year, the level of aware­ness of FOSS notice­ably improves. Whereas at pre­vi­ous shows we would spend much energy expound­ing the basic con­cepts of FOSS/​Linux, this year most people had either heard of it or were already using FOSS products such as Fire­fox and Open​Of​fice​.org.

One thing we did dif­fer­ently this year was place more focus on FOSS run­ning on Win­dows. Our past efforts have been meet with some res­ist­ance, as installing a dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tem posed a bar­rier to entry that many would not sur­mount. We had plenty of cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc to dis­trib­ute, in addi­tion to Fedora, Ubuntu, Edubuntu and Mandriva.

The fact that the NSW Dept of Edu­ca­tion is migrat­ing over 40,000 PCs across the state to Open​Of​fice​.org was a use­ful selling point as well.

Our mar­ket­ing efforts have been improv­ing with each event. Our mes­sage is becom­ing more refined, and our leaf­lets are becom­ing more rel­ev­ant. On the tech­nical side, FOSS is becom­ing easier and more access­ible, with pro­jects such the afore­men­tioned OpenE­duca­tionDisc and Wubi lead­ing the way.

Our Web pres­ence is improv­ing, too. It’s far easier to point a new­bie to just one easy-​​to-​​remember URL instead of con­fus­ing them with a list. In addi­tion, I built an edu­ca­tion portal for Linux Aus­tralia just in time for the expo.

There were at least two other stands that were FOSS-​​friendly. In fact, one of the largest stands were demon­strat­ing their Web-​​based soft­ware product on about ten com­puters, all of which were run­ning Ubuntu. Other stands expressed real interest when approached.

Other high­lights of our pres­ence included:

• OLPC XO laptops (from OLPC Aus­tralia)
• Intel Class­mate PCs (from Man­driva Australia)
• ASUS Eee PCs
• laptops show­ing Edubuntu

Rodger Dean has some pho­tos of the event.

A big thanks to every­one who helped at the stand:

• Ash­ley Lynn
• Ash­ley Maher
• Brendan Puck­eridge
• David Andresen
• Gloria Arnold
• Har­rison Conlin
• John Arnold
• Megha Kanth
• Pia Waugh
• Rodger Dean
• Vicki Burke

A spe­cial thank you goes to Melissa Draper, who was instru­mental in ensur­ing the suc­cess of the stand in more ways than one.

LotD: Insur­ance com­pany bets health on open source — I’m quite heav­ily involved in this pro­ject, so need­less to say I’m proud of what we’ve achieved

The Edu­ca­tion Expo is on this week­end. I’ve sent a couple of missives to our help­ers. The second one con­tains some advice that would work well in many situ­ations regard­ing FOSS (espe­cially where mar­ket­ing is con­cerned), so I’ll repro­duce it (slightly edited) here:

Sub­ject: Edu­ca­tion Expo, this week­end!
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:29
From: Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan <sridhar@​dhanapalan.​com>
To: SLUG Activ­it­ies <activities@​slug.​org.​au>

Thanks again to every­one who has volun­teered to help with the Linux Aus­tralia stand at the Edu­ca­tion Expo.

The expo itself runs from 9am to 4pm on Sat­urday and Sunday. Entry is free. It’s a fun day for fam­il­ies with chil­dren in the K-​​12 space, so feel free to bring along your kids and make a day (or two!) out of it.

This year, the expo will be held in Rose­hill Racecourse’s brand new Events Centre, and our stand is in a prime pos­i­tion right in front of the door. If you haven’t already, take a look at the ori­ginal announce­ment and the Edu­ca­tion Expo Web site.

I asked in my pre­vi­ous mes­sage if people could tell me when they would be avail­able to help out. If you haven’t already, please let me know. If you’re unsure, that’s fine too: just show up and grab me at the stand.

I’ll be there at 8am on Sat­urday (an hour before it starts) to set up the stand, and prob­ably at 8:30 on Sunday. I might need some assist­ance to set up, and also to pack up afterwards.

Some tips:

• Wear com­fort­able cas­ual cloth­ing. It might get hot in the exhib­i­tion hall.
• If you’ve got any Linux or FOSS themed cloth­ing, wear that
• Wear com­fort­able shoes. You’ll be stand­ing most of the time.
• Keep some water handy.
• Talk­ing to stand vis­it­ors can strain your throat. Some mints can help.

Make it clear to vis­it­ors that there is a vibrant FOSS com­munity in Aus­tralia, and espe­cially in Sydney. Invite them to SLUG, which meets in the city on the last Fri­day of every month (next meet­ing on 27 June). SLUG has a seg­ment known as ‘SLUG­lets’, which is inten­ded for newbies.

Famil­i­ar­ise your­self with the leaf­lets that we will distribute:

• http://​link​pot​.net/​r​a​v​i​n​es/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​d​e​t​h​r​o​ne/
• http://​link​pot​.net/​t​r​e​m​o​l​os/

Have a read of Linux Australia’s guides to Free and Open Source Soft­ware (FOSS) and FOSS in edu­ca­tion. Remem­ber to pro­mote these to stand vis­it­ors as the best place to start with Linux and FOSS:

• http://​linux​.org​.au/​l​i​nux
• http://​linux​.org​.au/​e​d​u​c​a​t​ion

One import­ant point to remem­ber is that Linux is not FOSS. We will be hand­ing out cop­ies of the OpenE­duca­tionDisc, which is a CD full of education-​​oriented FOSS for Win­dows. Not every­one is able to switch over to Linux cold-​​turkey, but we can get them star­ted with FOSS on Win­dows first.

Sim­il­arly, open stand­ards are not FOSS, but they are a good start. Inform people about the dangers of pro­pri­et­ary file formats, as seen with Microsoft Office, and pro­mote in their stead open altern­at­ives such as Open­Doc­u­ment and PDF.

Show people that Linux isn’t strange and new. Many don’t real­ise it, but they are already using FOSS. For example:

• Fire­fox and Open­Of­fice are becom­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar. The NSW Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion is in the pro­cess of switch­ing over >40,000 school com­puters to OpenOffice.
• Wiki­pe­dia is built around the idea of open know­ledge, inspired dir­ectly from the FOSS move­ment (and it’s built on FOSS too!).
• Even Mac OS X has many import­ant com­pon­ents based on FOSS, such as the ker­nel, file shar­ing, print­ing and the Web browser.
• About two-​​thirds of Web sites are served by the FOSS Web server, Apache.
• Most of the large Web com­pan­ies (like Google, Face­book and Yahoo) are built with FOSS.
• It is nor­mal for Hol­ly­wood films to be cre­ated using Linux.
• Linux is pre­val­ent in a range of con­sumer devices.
• The pop­u­lar ASUS Eee PC, and many of its com­pet­it­ors, come with Linux pre-​​installed.

Show people that Linux is easy to install and use. Ubuntu has an installer called Wubi, which is a Win­dows applic­a­tion that installs Ubuntu as a file without par­ti­tion­ing the hard drive. It behaves like a nor­mal dual-​​boot sys­tem, but it can be unin­stalled from ‘Add/​Remove Pro­grams’ just like any Win­dows applic­a­tion. We’ll also have cop­ies of Edubuntu. Remem­ber that this is an add-​​on com­pan­ion, not a stand-​​alone liveCD as in the past. Give a copy of Ubuntu with every Edubuntu disc you distribute.

Linux is more secure. While noth­ing can claim to be 100% secure and virus proof, Linux has an excel­lent track record. It doesn’t need ‘band-​​aid’ solu­tions like anti-​​virus and anti-​​spyware soft­ware because the soft­ware was built sanely to begin with. The Inter­net was built for UNIX, not for Windows.

Linux and FOSS is great for fam­il­ies. It’s afford­able and reli­able. It won’t get infec­ted and show unso­li­cited porn adverts to your chil­dren. There are heaps of great edu­ca­tional soft­ware install­able with just a few mouse clicks.

Some caveats:

• As a com­munity stand, we are not selling anything.
• Avoid unne­ces­sary Microsoft-​​bashing. We’re run­ning the stand because we love FOSS, not because we hate Microsoft.

The second Open CeBIT in Sydney ended last week. Form­ing a sec­tion of the much lar­ger CeBIT expo, Open CeBIT focused on open source tech­no­lo­gies and solu­tions. I was involved in three stands: BizCubed (my employer), Linux Aus­tralia and Open Source Industry Aus­tralia.

In the mar­ket, FOSS is clearly matur­ing and becom­ing more main­stream. At a CeBIT a couple of years ago, I’d be answer­ing basic ques­tions like, “what is open source?”, “what is Linux?” and “how do you make money?” This year, I didn’t get any ques­tions like that at all. Most people knew some­thing about Linux and FOSS, and just needed some dir­ec­tion to get started.

We had much interest in com­munity and gen­eral usage at the Linux Aus­tralia stand. Our Fedora, Ubuntu and Edubuntu discs were pop­u­lar. Of immense pop­ular­ity were our OLPC XOs, thanks to OLPC Aus­tralia. Vis­it­ors were genu­inely inter­ested in the units, and I didn’t hear any neg­at­ive feed­back at all. I do believe that a lot of people did under­stand that this is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject for chil­dren in the devel­op­ing world and not just a laptop project.

At the Open Source Industry Aus­tralia stand, I spoke to many people who were inter­ested in deploy­ing FOSS solu­tions to solve spe­cific prob­lems. Many of these people would not have con­sidered FOSS in the past, so clearly our mes­sage is resonating.

Com­ing up in a couple of weeks (June 14–15) is the Edu­ca­tion Expo. We’ve always been suc­cess­ful there, and all signs point to us repeat­ing that.

LotD: MacGyver is favour­ite dis­aster hero

Lately, I’ve been think­ing more than ever about ways to pro­mote free and open source soft­ware to a non-​​technical crowd. This has largely been promp­ted by the Edu­ca­tion Expo in Sydney, for which I am co-​​ordinating the Linux Aus­tralia stand (Stand F9). Cur­rently on my mind is Open CeBIT, which is right around the corner. I’ve been doing some (for­tu­nately not all) plan­ning for two stands, my employer’s and Linux Australia’s.

Here are some thoughts I have had regard­ing FOSS mar­ket­ing. It’s a bit of a jumble, but hope­fully it comes of some help.

• Mar­ket­ing is just struc­tured, meth­od­ical, non-​​rabid evan­gel­ism. It isn’t inher­ently dirty, and it is not syn­onym­ous with advert­ising (advert­ising can be a part of mar­ket­ing, but the two aren’t con­joined). We in the FOSS com­munity need to get over the stigma that is some­times attached to ‘mar­ket­ing’, so that we may har­ness it for good and not evil.
• Identify your tar­get audi­ence, then determ­ine what kinds of ques­tions they will be asking/​thinking. This is Mar­ket­ing 101, but it can be easy to lose sight of. While can be good to cast a wide net, being tac­tic­ally focused can often yield bet­ter res­ults. For the Edu­ca­tion Expo we have a leaf­let spe­cific­ally for stu­dents, and for CeBIT we have one for busi­nesses.
• As a follow-​​on from the pre­vi­ous point, know whom to keep on-​​side. While your school/​university might be using Microsoft products, that doesn’t neces­sar­ily mean that they are in bed with Bill Gates. Don’t assume malice when the more likely reason is simple ignor­ance or mis­un­der­stand­ing. Writ­ing an accus­at­ive art­icle in your stu­dent paper might give you a tem­por­ary sense of sat­is­fac­tion, but such a hos­tile approach is more than likely to back­fire on you and cement the Establishment’s neg­at­ive (or lack of) opin­ion on FOSS. Try to gently edu­cate, not censure.
• Rel­ev­ant case stud­ies are pure gold. If you’re deal­ing with the edu­ca­tion sec­tor, talk about suc­cess­ful school deploy­ments, inter­est­ing pro­jects like One Laptop Per Child and appro­pri­ate devices like the Asus Eee PC.
• Ref­er­en­cing hon­est, inde­pend­ent stud­ies can be much more per­suas­ive than refer­ring to press releases or vendor-​​sponsored reports.
• There are some angles that might not dir­ectly apply to the tar­get professions/​market, but might peri­pher­ally be of interest to people. This includes things like the bene­fits to the local eco­nomy and industry, the envir­on­ment, gov­ern­ment and so on.
• Most people either have chil­dren, are chil­dren or have a soft spot for chil­dren. FOSS is great for kids and edu­ca­tion, so be able to talk about that! Par­ents are always look­ing for ways to get their kids engaged in fun and con­struct­ive activ­it­ies, if only so that they can have five minutes of peace and quiet in the house
• Focus on value, not cost. It might not cost any­thing to acquire and use FOSS, but people are nat­ur­ally scep­tical of things that are pro­moted as hav­ing no cost (and really, who can blame them?). Lead­ing your argu­ment with “it’s free” leaves people to won­der if there is a catch or if the product is of a lesser qual­ity. To take Open​Of​fice​.org as an example, it com­pares very favour­ably to Microsoft Office in terms of func­tion­al­ity and of course free­dom. To stress the ‘free­ware’ angle is to sell it short, and could leave your listener to believe that it’s just an ‘el cheapo’ knock-​​off. The fact that many com­pan­ies (e.g. Sun, Nov­ell, IBM) con­trib­ute to and bene­fit from OpenOffice.org’s devel­op­ment is evid­ence that it is of a high stand­ard and is of eco­nomic value. Fire­fox is a great example to use, as almost every­one has some famili­ar­ity with it. Fire­fox has benefited greatly from Google and AOL, to name but two major con­trib­ut­ors. In turn, these com­pan­ies have built busi­ness mod­els around it (not so much AOL these days, but they are still prob­ably the largest con­trib­utor overall).
• FOSS is very pro-​​free-​​market, and is in fact sim­ilar to the ideal held by many eco­nom­ists known as per­fect com­pet­i­tion. As already men­tioned, Linux has and con­tin­ues to be bene­fi­cial to a very wide range of com­pan­ies and industries.
• Free­dom is vital, but I find that people nor­mally don’t under­stand if you begin your explan­a­tion by talk­ing about dis­trib­uted devel­op­ment or Soft­ware Libre. Start by talk­ing about more obvi­ous bene­fits, like soft­ware qual­ity, rapid devel­op­ment, long-​​term afford­ab­il­ity, reli­ab­il­ity and so on. This will inev­it­ably lead people to won­der how this can be achieved, and of course the answer is that it is all Free Soft­ware. Then you have your open­ing to talk about soft­ware free­dom and the FOSS com­munity, and it will seem much more rel­ev­ant to your audi­ence. This isn’t a mat­ter of de-​​emphasising Free­dom, but rather a way to pre­pare your audi­ence so that they can be more recept­ive to it.
• Of course, there are the age-​​old argu­ments versus Win­dows sur­round­ing speed, vir­uses, and so on. But it is bet­ter to keep the Microsoft-​​bashing to a min­imum. Going off on an anti-​​Microsoft rant only fuels those who like to falsely label FOSS sup­port­ers as communists/​anarchists/​anti-​​capitalists.
• Nev­er­the­less, pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware is poten­tially cap­able of match­ing FOSS for qual­ity, speed, secur­ity, etc.. The one thing they can­not match is Free­dom. Free­dom is our fun­da­mental advantage.
• Ana­lo­gies to parts of every­day life can help to make people con­nect with the ideas behind FOSS. Simple things like shar­ing and modi­fy­ing recipes, lend­ing a book, open­ing the bon­net of your car and remix­ing music are already accep­ted (indeed, expec­ted) by the gen­eral popu­lace, and have dir­ect par­al­lels to the prin­ciples of FOSS.
• Speak­ing of ana­lo­gies and examples, appro­pri­ate ones are closer than you may think. Just about every­one uses FOSS in some form or other. Fire­fox, Open​Of​fice​.org, the GIMP, Google, You­tube, Face­book, Wiki­pe­dia and Apache are all great examples. There is noth­ing to be afraid of.
• Mac OS X users are already pro­lific users of FOSS, as their oper­at­ing sys­tem con­tains some BSD, Samba, CUPS and more. They are famil­iar with FOSS without even know­ing it.
• EULAs and DRM mean that the soft­ware or media file that you just bought isn’t really owned by you. Your rights are restric­ted and can be revoked at any time. This should be cause for con­cern for any consumer.
• It might help to cap­it­al­ise Free Soft­ware in doc­u­ment­a­tion, as a means of emphasis and to dif­fer­en­ti­ate from freeware.
• Be hon­est! Free soft­ware is inher­ently hon­est and account­able by vir­tue of being open. We should be using his hon­esty and open­ness as our advant­age. Remem­ber that there’s a dif­fer­ence between explain­ing some­thing in an attract­ive way and out­right lying. Don’t make FOSS sound bet­ter than it really is. Noth­ing is per­fect, and if you make FOSS sound per­fect you’ll likely be met with sus­pi­cion. Linux isn’t Win­dows — it does look an feel dif­fer­ent. But it’s not neces­sar­ily any bet­ter or worse (depend­ing on the par­tic­u­lar soft­ware in ques­tion), it’s just a bit dif­fer­ent. If you lead people to think that Open​Of​fice​.org is the same as Microsoft Office, they might rail against it at the slight­est dif­fer­ence they find. It’s dif­fer­ent, but cer­tainly no more dif­fer­ent than Office 2003 is from Office 2007. At the end of the day, it’s about man­aging expect­a­tions — por­tray­ing FOSS in a pos­it­ive light but not cre­at­ing unreal­istic hopes. The last thing we want are a bat­talion of users dis­gruntled because they expec­ted FOSS to be able to vacuum their house. Those people will be far less likely to try FOSS again, even years later.
• As a corol­lary of the pre­vi­ous point, advocacy is about man­aging expect­a­tions. Set real­istic expect­a­tions and people will be less likely to be dis­ap­poin­ted in the longer term.
• Avoid sound­ing like you’re selling snake oil. Copi­ous use of all-​​caps, bold text and exclam­a­tion marks runs the risk of mak­ing your well-​​intentioned writ­ing look like just another scam.
• Be pos­it­ive! People don’t want to read bad news, and there’s plenty of good stuff to say about FOSS. Hon­esty takes pri­or­ity, but phrase it well.
• Be pre­pared to fight FUD, but remain positive.
• Free soft­ware is more trust­worthy. Would you trust your pri­vacy and sens­it­ive data (Web brows­ing his­tory, e-​​mail, fin­an­cial records, etc.) to non-​​auditable soft­ware? Iden­tity theft and other forms of cyber­crime are a major and under­ap­pre­ci­ated prob­lem. The old asser­tion that nobody would bother to “hack” into your home com­puter is mis­lead­ing, as most intru­sions are made by bots and worms.
• A pic­ture can tell a thou­sand words. A video can tell a mil­lion. A good screen­cast works won­ders. If you’re run­ning a stand at an expo, have a mon­itor play­ing a pile of screen­casts in a con­tinu­ous loop, with sub­titles (because people are unlikely to be able to hear any­thing on a crowded show floor).
• Inter­na­tion­al­isa­tion and Access­ib­il­ity can be power­ful draw­cards for some, espe­cially those of non-​​English speak­ing backgrounds.
• Not every­body loves FOSS (yet), but few can argue against the mer­its of open stand­ards. Most FOSS is built around open standards.
• Open stand­ards are at least as import­ant as Free Soft­ware. Don’t con­flate the two — pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware can employ open stand­ards. Even if someone rejects Open​Of​fice​.org, I’d feel some solace know­ing that they’re con­vert­ing their MS Office doc­u­ments to PDF (an open stand­ard) for shar­ing with others.
• Make it as easy as pos­sible for people to get involved. Hand out CDs or DVDs with soft­ware use­ful to your audi­ence, like Ubuntu/​Edubuntu and the OpenDisc/​OpenE­duca­tionDisc. Don’t expect people to jump ship straight to Linux. Let them get their feet wet first with FOSS apps on Win­dows, LiveCDs, dual boots and so on. Baby steps are much easier to make than massive strides.
• Wel­come people to get involved in your com­munity. Ask them to join your mail­ing lists. Invite them to your next LUG meet­ing. Make sure they are fully aware that there’s a vibrant com­munity out there to help them. They can even make friends and employment/​business contacts.
• There’s only so much that you can include in a short article/​spiel, so be sure to refer to other resources that have more inform­a­tion. Quote or link to sources if you feel they do a good job — there’s no sense in try­ing to rein­vent the wheel. Nobody wants a link farm, though. Be select­ive in your ref­er­ences so that people don’t feel overwhelmed.
• And finally, keep it short and sweet. I’ve lis­ted a lot of points here, but if you tried to cover them all in one go you will end up with a speech/​document that is unac­cept­ably long or lack­ing in depth (like this one! ). Split them up, or struc­ture them so that the basic mes­sage is passed early on, with the rest being elaboration/​explanation.

We’ve got lots of good stuff to say about FOSS, but what mat­ters is not so much what we say but how we say it.

There appears to be much con­fu­sion amongst the press and the gen­eral popu­lace regard­ing the One Laptop Per Child Pro­ject, which I blogged about earlier. This art­icle in the Mur­doch press, for example, has stim­u­lated some of these mis­con­cep­tions. They stem from the false assump­tion that the OLPC is a com­put­ing pro­ject. “Don’t these kids deserve food, water, cloth­ing and shel­ter first?”, some people ask.

The fact is that the OLPC is far more than a simple com­put­ing pro­ject. It is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject, or more broadly, a devel­op­ment pro­ject. The com­puter is merely the tool to enable edu­ca­tion and cre­ativ­ity. How can one learn when a text­book costs more than an aver­age weekly wage? Ima­gine if you could inter­act with your text­book, in the form of games and exer­cises. Ima­gine if you could learn to write your own soft­ware for this device, and dis­trib­ute it to help oth­ers in your com­munity. You can cre­ate your own art­works, write your own novel or make your own music. Wire­less mesh net­work­ing allows the dis­tri­bu­tion of data between com­puters, and even the shar­ing of one Inter­net con­nec­tion across a vil­liage. For many house­holds, the key­board lights will be the only form of arti­fi­cial light­ing. The pos­sib­il­it­ies are effect­ively limitless.

The point that I am try­ing to make is that it is not the com­puter that is import­ant, it is what you can do with it that truly mat­ters. The com­puter is an ena­bler, a tool that allows people to ulti­mately cre­ate their own live­li­hoods and futures. There’s no point in keep­ing people depend­ent on handouts. Let’s encour­age them to stand on their own feet.

Back in the developed world, I was able to attend a panel dis­cus­sion for NSW ICT for the forth­com­ing state elec­tion. Pia made some good ana­lysis of the event. In sum­mary, the rep­res­ent­at­ive for the Lib­eral Party was com­pletely and utterly use­less when the ques­tion turned to open stand­ards and FLOSS. Moreover, both sides (Labour and Lib­eral) would seem­ingly delib­er­ately con­fuse open stand­ards and open source when ques­tioned about them. The key when ques­tion­ing such people is to not men­tion open stand­ards and open source together. Force them to address the issues sep­ar­ately, or they will con­flate the two. The City of Munich was dis­par­agingly referred to sev­eral times as an extreme case. What dis­turbs me is that there was spe­cific­ally strong emphasis on NSW as a pro­curer and con­sumer of ICT, rather than as a pro­du­cer. So while pro­jects like the OLPC can pro­mote local edu­ca­tion and industry, the NSW gov­ern­ment wants to keep us depend­ent upon for­eign providers.

The pen­guins are on the march in India. It’s won­der­ful to see the states of Ker­ala and Tamil Nadu tak­ing their future devel­op­ment ser­i­ously by adopt­ing free soft­ware on a wide scale. My par­ents are from Tamil Nadu, and most of their fam­il­ies still live there. Some of them have been involved quite con­sid­er­ably in edu­ca­tional and com­put­ing pro­jects, which have unfor­tu­nately been based around Win­dows. This doesn’t help any­one in the long term (apart from the vendors con­trolling the lock-​​in), so it is ter­rific to see them work­ing towards some autonomy and freedom.

P.S. As of today, I am a quarter of a cen­tury old. Howzat?!

Update: On the con­verse, we have abso­lutely appalling con­duct in the so-​​called ‘developed’ world. How can a demo­cracy func­tion when the mech­an­isms of gov­ern­ment are hid­den behind pro­pri­et­ary data con­structs? Is it truly wise to hand the keys to pub­lic inform­a­tion over to cor­por­a­tions that have zero account­ab­il­ity to the popu­lace? Even their so-​​called ‘open’ formats aren’t really open at all.

This is quite disturbing:

A 2006 Gal­lup sur­vey of Amer­ican pub­lic opin­ion found that “many Amer­ic­ans har­bour strong bias against U.S. Muslims”.

• 22% say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbour.
• 34% believe U.S. Muslims sup­port al-​​Qaeda.
• Only 49% believe U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States.
• 39% advoc­ate that U.S. Muslims should carry spe­cial ID

The fact that such a large per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion har­bours resent­ment against Muslims may explain much of America’s aggress­ive Middle East policy from Israel to Iraq. It’s a lot easier to play with the lives of mil­lions of people if you don’t think of them as civ­il­ised human beings, but ter­ror­ist supporters.

This appears to be con­sist­ent with other stud­ies:

The Media and Soci­ety Research Group of Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity con­duc­ted a sur­vey in Novem­ber of Amer­ic­ans with respect to their atti­tudes towards Muslims. Nearly half (44%) of respond­ents favoured restrict­ing the civil rights of Muslims in some way.

Such atti­tudes often stem from ignor­ance. It is exceed­ingly easy to dehu­man­ise a race/​religion/​culture if you know noth­ing about them:

A sur­vey com­mis­sioned and pub­lished by National Geo­graphic shows that a large major­ity of young Amer­ic­ans between the age of 18–24 are geo­graph­ic­ally illiterate.

Less than 15% of the sub­jects could loc­ate Iraq or Israel on a map. Only 17% could loc­ate Afgh­anistan, even though the sur­vey was car­ried out after the war. 11% could not loc­ate the U.S. on a map.

Now, I am not post­ing this to pick on Amer­ic­ans. In fact, I feel that at least to some extent these res­ults also apply to Aus­tralia and other West­ern coun­tries (e.g. the UK). We like to think of ourselves as ‘enlightened’ soci­et­ies, yet the ignor­ance many people appear to exhibit is astound­ing. There is much in the way of mis­in­form­a­tion and FUD being spread around, inten­tional and oth­er­wise. The solu­tion, I feel, is edu­ca­tion. For instance, I bet that the aver­age Aus­tralian knows very little about Islam: its beliefs, its his­tory and the cul­tures sur­round­ing it. It is all to easy to judge people and events by our own val­ues, the prin­ciples by which we were raised. People need to under­stand that what may look like ‘com­mon sense’ to them is in fact a cul­tural con­struct, and that other cul­tures may see things dif­fer­ently. This diversity is what makes the world inter­est­ing, and this abund­ance of dif­fer­ent views is what has pro­pelled human devel­op­ment since the very beginning.

Those who like to argue that Islam is a back­wards reli­gion or that its people cel­eb­rate an ana­chron­istic cul­ture ought to invest­ig­ate the 1001 Inven­tions Web site:

A unique UK based edu­ca­tional pro­ject that reveals the rich her­it­age that the Muslim com­munity share with other com­munit­ies in the UK and Europe.

1001 Inven­tions is a non-​​religious and non-​​political pro­ject seek­ing to allow the pos­it­ive aspects of pro­gress in sci­ence and tech­no­logy to act as a bridge in under­stand­ing the inter­de­pend­ence of com­munit­ies through­out human history.

Pia has very elo­quently indic­ated the divide between reli­gion and cul­ture, and in doing so I feel she has demon­strated how truly close many world reli­gions are in their core beliefs and values.