Hey All,
Welcome to Project Vidyalaya.
Let me introduce myself, My name is Ram, better known in my nick, voidspacexyz.
Let me take a few moments to explain the need and ideas of Vidyalaya.
I suppose since we are here, most of us are primarily FOSS enthusiasts or
Hacktivists. We all do
talk and support FOSS in anyways for us possible. It is either in making sure
that we use FOSS as
out everyday tool, or talking about it or contributing to it and more.
So lets rethink how we came to what we are today. We all start at a place where
we all get educated,
and become qualified as an graduate. But how many of these educational
institutions actually
use FOSS in their college labs. Also if they had to put up a FOSS in their
college lab, the typical
taboo of what if something fails, should I use the command line on all 200
computers ? Who will
provide support ? etc etc . . The questions and the doubts goes on.
But more than that, Educational Instutitions by the use of proprietary
software, are teaching its
students to be a dependent citizens of a Free world. But on the other hand
FOSS, teaches us to be
independent and sharing with out knowledge and skills towards the society. And
the mere fact that,
most of the softwares used are pirated, the educational institutions itself set
a wrong example for
the students of this society.
Project Vidylaya was born out of this need to solve the issues that educational
institutions face
and try to see if we can propose a solution in this line of quesitons.
I hear you saying, BOSS, Edbuntu, Edu Debian etc etc, are already there for
them ? No, we are not
trying to do what BOSS or Edbuntu or Edu Debian are trying to do.
We are trying to build something very different here. We are not talking about
an FOSS OS, that you
can install in all the 150 - 200 lab computers, we are talking about an FOSS
OS, that you can install
in your server, that will inturn, install, build and orchestrate all the lab
computers through a
centralized server. We would also build a web gui, to manage and orchestrate
the whole computer lab
setup easily.
Now this is just a breif idea of what we are trying to do.
Now that this has been told, there are a few teams that would be focussing on
various parts of the
whole project.
The potential teams could be
* SysOps
* WebDev
* Outreach & Evangelists
* Documentation
SysOps
SysOps would primarily be involved in spanning the operating system image,
creating and maintaining
the packages, providing patches and updates, designing and developing platforms
to manage the
infrastructure from a single point. This would also involve build an automated
iso builder
(using Jenkins) and also making sure to write automated testing frameworks for
making sure that the
OS works, the networked installation works and more
WebDev
This team would primarily be focussing on web app that allows the system admins
to administer
their tasks using a web application.The App should be capable of configuring
network installation
and configuration of the Operating System, installation, upgradation and
removal of new/existing
software packages, configuring network interfaces, managing files and the
filesystem itself,
account creation, deletion and lockdown and other system admin tasks.
** WebDev and SysOps will work *hand-in-hand* to get these applications ready.
Outreach and Evangalism
Outreach as the name suggests will be front face in taking the Project
Vidyalaya to the world.
Its primary tasks involves reaching out to the communities and institutions to
increase the adoption
rate of the project. This team would also manage our public visibility on
social network platform etc.
Documentation
Needless to say, the documentation team has to *keep the all the documents
related to project upto
date and accurate* including the git repositories' README, copyright license
notice, terms, the
technical documentation, project's website, blog e.t.c. It has to be ensured
that the technical
documentation is of such a detail that it explains how the complex tasks can be
done in a simpler way
using our Web App. The task of *localization* of packages will also be handled
by the Documentation
team until a need arises to separate this task and assign it to allocated
workforce.
Now that we have categorized, needless to say, any discussions coming to the
mailing list would
require the Team Name to be attached to the subject, as we have only one
mailing list for the whole
project.
EX : [SysOps] Jenkins Ahoy !
This would help us organize ourselves and also be able to seperate supports
requests from development
discussions.
I know that has been a pretty long email. :-D Dont tell me TL;DR :-D
Anyways, once again, Welcome aboard. We appreciate your FOSS spirit, and we are
looking forward to
meeting and working you all soon :-)
Happy FOSS'ing :-)
Cheerios,
Ram a.k.a voidspacexyz
PS : Excuse any typos :-)