SIGs/University

This SIG focuses on problems related to Universities and education, that is onboarding students into utilizing free software.

There is a large disconnection between free software distributions and consumers at universities. Students, professors, and upstream projects do not know how to or are not interested in making all projects play nicely with each other. We believe that role can - and should - be filled by the distribution, providing environments for courses and student projects.

A very common occurence is for courses to require specific software that requires the usage of Linux or a specific language. Oftentimes, the student has never used Linux or the given language, and they resort to installing the first available solution found on the internet.

Making Fedora a go-to decision in regards to educational purposes would help solve many problems in advance, as universities tend to experiment with many different technologies.

Rationale

There are many students in the Fedora community. Some of them are packaging software specific to their university or courses, promoting free software on their campus, or - to some extent - acting as the local Linux support for other students. Some of us met at Flock Budapest (Summer 2019) and decided to work together to make Fedora more accessible to students and courses.

Members

• Marcel Plch / dormouse / University of the Highlands and Islands
• Tim Zabel / tjzabel / Rochester Institute of Technology
• Ben Rosser / tc01 / University of Pennsylvania

Please add your name to this list if you are interested! You do not need to have any specific university status (student, collaborator, ...) to join us.

Current State

• Coordination tools
  • [X] Wiki page
  • [ ] Taiga board
  • [ ] Mailing list, discussion.fp.o category?
  • [ ] Chat (IRC/Matrix/?)
• Share with the Fedora community, find SIG members
• Define a roadmap for the SIG