[KDE-India] Question about communities and gatherings ...

[Knut Yrvin]

Thanks for all your answers about communities and gatherings :)

A lot of companies are a costumer to qt, and makes products with the 
library. The feedback is that the companies needs programmers with skills 
using free software tools as qt. Then to contact the free software 
programmers around the world is a good thing to see how we could share 
knowledge to the best for everyone. 

In projects as Skolelinux (Debian Edu) we have mentored student projects 
where some of the participants in that project are headhunted to the 
Norwegian software industry. I believe we could use a similar approach with 
qt, and we have really interesting projects to join, and places where more 
lightweight applications are needed. 

I really think we could get somewhere to making free software more 
attratctive to people in general after they have used it in their 
education. My idea is to get student projects working with free software as 
qt and KDE in projects as One Laptop per Child, Skolelinux / Debian-Edu, 
EduBuntu and K12LTSP. Thats a good thing for Trolltech too. Look at the 
links in the end of this e-mail.  

I will start in Trolltech the 1th of August, so things will take a little 
time before a strategy is ready for how Trolltech can strengthen the 
interaction with the community. So this e-mail to you is to check out how 
we could proceed in India, and how we could make it more interesting to use 
KDE and qt in free software projects for educational and end user purposes. 

So what do you think?

Some projects that is done since 2002 under the Skolelinux umbrella: 
http://d.skolelinux.no/info/studentgrupper/index.html.en

We are sharing experiences with the OLPC-project: 
http://laptop.org/

Different cooperation agreement between free software 
http://wiki.skolelinux.de/Kooperation/Edubuntu
http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/press/press_releases/joint_statement_20040702

Regards 

Knut Yrvin
Project manager (cel: +47 908 95 765) Skolelinux Norway. 
Office: SLX Debian Labs Forskningsparken, Gaustadalle 21, 0349 OSLO,
NORWAY.