Re: Call for projects for grants

[Juan Jesús Ojeda Croissier <jojeda gnome org>]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 12:53 AM, Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> 2009/4/1 Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> As far as I know, grants are typically given for projects that are
>> beneficial to the general public but not immediately profit-makers. You
>> can target an area where there's money - like accessibility, research in
>> the internet, open government/citizenship and perhaps education. I'm
>> short on ideas for many of these fields, but perhaps there are legs to
>> exploring them?
>>
>> Some ideas I have are:
>>
>> Accessibility:
[...]
>> Education:
>>
>> Not sure what we could target as a project here... probably something
>> concrete like a development project in partnership with a deployment,
>> perhaps with an existing big GNOME user like Extremadura?
>
> Actually improving the state for big deployment system administration,
> lockdown settings, and other stuff.
>
> For this, we can get in touch with Juanje Ojeda. He's a foundation
> member and he's working on the Guadalinex project in the Andalusian
> local government (a Linux distro for education, the biggest Linux
> deployment at Spain). He probably has a wide grasp on what's missing
> and what can be improved in GNOME for the educational sector. I'm
> pretty sure he's on the list, but I've put him in CC just in case.

Yes, I was following this thread and also I've told about it to the
people who is in charge of Guadalinex, because this is a very
interesting initiative.

I think the uses case from Andalusian and Extremadura are quite
interesting and useful for this because, for example, just at the
Andalusian's schools we have over 300.000 GNOME desktops, but there
are also over 600 internet centers in areas low populated with GNOME
desktops, also in libraries and so on. Extremadura has also a very
large deployment of GNOME desktops which are used everyday for
teaching and learning.

This year I was working in a LinEx SL, which is a Extremadura
distribution for the local Goverment employes. This distribution was a
very important key to get all the Extremadura administration working
with Linux and GNOME. But we had some problems. They needed a system
strongly oriented to profiles. I mean, they need a desktop for each
kind of worker they have, but using the same SO and usually the same
PC. And some times they need the profile be able to move with the
person. If a worker has to go to other department he need to be able
to have his tools, his documents and his whole working enviroment =
His desktop.

As Alberto said, to have a big deployment system and the possiblity of
lockdown settings, an easy way to define and apply profile and some
stuff like that are very important to the administrations. But also
for the schools.

For me this means something like PolicyKit + Gconf + Sabayon +
LDAP/Active Directory connector + something else. Everything working
fine together and with some improvements. For example, Sabayon is very
good idea, but it's not stable enough to be used in those deploys.

But accesibility is another big issue. In Guadalinex we work closely
with the main organization in Spain about accesibility, the ONCE[1].
We try to make improves about this following their experiences. For
example, the voices in Spanish have very bad quality and they said we
need to improve them because they were almost useless, so the people
from the goverment hired one company to create new voices, which are
now running on Guadalinex.
We've also created sort of accesibility profiles (based on what the
people of the ONCE tell us) with some accesibility settings and we
patch the gnome-system-tools to be able to select a profile and apply
to one user from the GUI. But it's kind of a hack, we need more
support for doing propertly.

Those are just some examples of what we need for our users, but I know
there is a big lack of a11 in GNOME. The people from the ONCE is
always complaining about that and our bosses as well.

If you like, I can ask for a full list of needed about a11 (or just
the most important ones) they has detected and demanded.

I can also pass any ideas or questions you have to people from
Extremadura or Andalusian's local government.

Greetings

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ONCE
-- 
Juanje