[kde-edu]: This KDE Science thing

[Stuart Jarvis]

Somehow missed Aleix's reply yesterday, so I'll deal with both here

On Tuesday, July 20, 2010 01:24:54 pm Thomas Thym wrote:
> When I see it right, we are facing two different tasks.
> 1. The structure of the development of our applications and
> 2. The marketing / promotion of our software.> 

I agree

> 1. Development of the specific applications
> From the programming and maintaining point of view I totally agree with
> Aleix to focus on one modul and therefore try to integrate the scientific
> KDE applications as well.

Yes. And as Aleix said, any move away from that would be for the science app 
developers to decide.

> (Perhaps it could be renamed in "KDE Education
> and Science" in the future if absolutely necessary.)

Perhaps, but I don't think there's any need for this. The issue for me is not 
that some of the science apps might not really fall under 'education' so much 
as there are several science apps that probably don't fit, for various reasons 
(release timing, quality at the moment) in a core KDE module such as Edu.

> 2. Marketing / "Selling" of the software package
> Our mainpages ([1], [2] and [3]) as it seems to me are (still) structured
> for developers and could be improved for users. Users are looking for
> solutions for their problems. As I read and heard in the last days schools
> and universities use a bunch of KDE (and other Open Source) apps through
> many "modules" (KDE-Edu apps as well as Krita, KOffice, the KDE Workspace
> and even OpenOffice.org).

True. [3] does this better than most by at least offering views of the apps by 
subject and by target age group.

> I am not sure if it is our core task to promote whole education packages or
> to promote our software to already existing promoters of FLOSS at schools
> (e.g. Skolelinux, OpenSUSE l-i-f-e, etc.). Both things will help us. I am
> open for both solutions.

Yep, both I think. Good presentation of applications by use case is helpful 
both for end users and for the likes of Skolelinux etc

> My first step: I created a Wiki page [4] to collect some ideas to show the
> potential of KDE Software at schools from a user perspective. Please feel
> free to improve it.
> If such a page exists yet, please let me know.
> 
> Does it make sense to build an equal page for KDE 4 Scientists, too?

Quite possibly. It's unlikely I'll get to it in the next 2-3 weeks though (I'm 
on vacation for two weeks starting on Saturday).

> Cheers,
> Thomas
> 
> [1] http://kde.org
> [2] http://kde.org/applications/education/
> [3] http://edu.kde.org/
> [4] http://community.kde.org/User:Ungethym/KDE4Schools
> 
> 
> 2010/7/19 Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org>
> 
> > On Saturday 17 July 2010 00:57:18 Akarsh Simha wrote:
> > > Hi
> > > 
> > > I was at Akademy, attended Stuart's talk, but couldn't make it to the
> > > BoF. In any case, I was wondering if a KDE science could be a good
> > > place for apps that are not education per se, but more research
> > > oriented stuff, to go into.
> > > 
> > > Let me pick an example app -- say I write a KDE front-end to an
> > > astronomical image processing program -- I don't think there's a place
> > > to put that as yet in KDE. I am inclined to believe that Cantor (but
> > > not Step) would possibly be better in such a place. Apart from that,
> > > there's a lot of scope for a lot more KDE applications to come up into
> > > KDE science -- I can think of a few potential apps in Physics (but of
> > > course, we do need coders!). Maybe creating a module called KDE
> > > science will spur up some action.
> > > 
> > > Regards
> > > Akarsh
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > kde-edu mailing list
> > > kde-edu at mail.kde.org
> > > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-edu
> > 
> > That depends a lot on what you do consider for education. Getting to know
> > more
> > things is both science and education. I understand the target is a little
> > different but I don't think it is that much.
> > 
> > If we consider we need two different coordinations it's fine to have a
> > separate
> > module but that would double quite some effort. We can see that KDE
> > Science iniciative as a promoting KDE (overall) for science creation and
> > let the programs to be organized as they are now. I'd say it's the
> > science developers
> > who should decide if they want to organize separatedly, but given that
> > this iniciative is coming from promo I don't see a reason for splitting
> > development
> > modules.
> > 
> > Aleix
> > _______________________________________________
> > kde-edu mailing list
> > kde-edu at mail.kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-edu