mEDUXa is in Canary Islands' schools...so now what?

Speaker: Agustín Benito Bethencourt

By the time aKademy takes place, mEDUXa will be deployed in 300 out of the 1100 schools planned. We have already come to many conclusions related to the deployment process, and from the demands from students and teachers. Additionally, by that time, we will have identified many of the major technical issues and solved some of them. At aKademy we want to present our findings from the two years since we started, and our plans for the project in the following months.

Description of the project

mEDUXa is a Free Software GNU/Linux distribution developed for educational purposes that is part of the MEDUSA project. It is being deployed in 35,000 computers distributed in 1100 schools, which represents 325,000 possible users (25,000 teachers and 300,000 students) in the Canary Islands state schools. Teachers and students will be able to use it through a dual boot, accessing it by a boot loader. mEDUXa has KDE as its desktop and it is based on Kubuntu.

The Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Canary Island Local Government chose local Free Software companies for developing mEDUXa. These companies are members of Canarian Free Software Companies Association (ESLIC Empresas de Software LIbre de Canarias).
The companies are:
- Fotón Sistemas Inteligentes (Grupo CPD.- www.grupocpd.com)
- Conysis Inv. y Des. (Grupo CPD.- www.grupocpd.com)
- Ejercicios Resueltos (Grupo CPD.- www.grupocpd.com)
- Bufete Fajardo López (www.fajardolopez.com)

The whole project has been developed under Free licences as defined by the Debian project.

To get more information visit these web pages:
- http://www.grupocpd.com/archivos_documentos/info_meduxa/meduxa_project_released (english)
- http://www.gobiernodecanarias.org/medusa/contenidos/infraestructuras/meduxa.html (spanish)
- http://www.grupocpd.com/archivos_documentos/info_meduxa/lanzamiento_meduxa_1/PloneArticle_view (spanish)

Conclusions so far

We are going to present the conclusions we have made so far around these basic lines:
- Technical issues involved with the development and deployment.
- Users considerations about the quality of mEDUXa, especially about usability issues.
- Support and maintenance problems faced.
- Community project design.
- Relationship with other projects.

What are we going to do next?

There are some key points we have to solve in the following months to accomplish the goals we planned two years ago, especially establishing relationships with the wider community. Additionally, we have to include a wider range of edu apps in mEDUXa. Documentation and feedback from our users has to be improved, and we will present some of the actions we plan to take over the next two years to do that. In particular, many of them depend on the path taken by the KDE project, and we would like to discuss our requirements for the future with the KDE community, and what areas we can collaborate on.