Hi there, putting the topic back to the list for others to see and discuss. :-)
Alexandro requested funding from the infrastructure project holders/advisors (Stefan Taxhet, Christian Lohmaier and myself) for an e-learning platform. As I'm fairly new in my role as budget advisor please bear with me if something is wrong, I try to do my best to follow the process. :-) We want to keep discussion public, so I guess this list is the best for this purpose.
Hi actually the request is to get VPS avialable on the infrastructure so we can develop our own webapps. Up till now we have only relly on packaged webapp projects (drupal, mediawiki, etc).
Is the funding request for several webapps, or do you specifically want to have the e-learning platform funded? I'd prefer having named projects for funding requests, as "developing webapps" is such a far range... it's easier to see concrete projects to fund. Can we stick to the e-learning platform for this request?
OOoES has a group of PHP developers and we would want to develop our own applications. OOoES has recieved some hosting offers as satelite sites, just like BrOO has it for example. However the idea is to keep them on the official domain. So we are looking into the option to have this VPS option within services.openofice.org. If we don't see a response then we'll go with the VPS as a satelite site.
I agree that it would be a fantastic idea to have an own e-learning platform inside the project, hosted on a machine that is reachable from within .services.openoffice.org. It's a similar principle we have for other services like QAtrack or buildbots.
The idea on the Learning project is to have a Moodle app that is avialable to OOoES (and other projects). We'll grant educator rights so the community can build their own courses and offer them either as free courses, or featured courses for a cost. Basically what is called a Virtual Knowledge Marketplace, similar to the extensions.
This sounds like a fantastic idea, and I'm basically agreeing to such a funding request if we can agree on some rules:
- The content needs to be developed in English as well, so other NLC projects have it easier to translate them.
- It should be open for all project members. I could imagine the documentation project and education project will be interested, too.
- We start with funding for a fixed time, like 12 months, and see how things developed until then. Maybe we find sponsors, or otherwise continue sponsoring ourselves.
As far as Education that's all we want to get at. VPS on the other hand will help us devlop other solutions on different languages, frameworks, etc.
What other services do you have in mind? Any concrete plans so far? otherwise I propose we talk about this as soon as you have more concrete plans, and start with the e-learning platform first.
Yes the idea is to have a platform for users to put their content on. I am not sure if the content will be as a free license but the code will be. The idea is to have a knowledge marketplace, open course
Hmmm... I'm hesitating to give money to a project that produces non-free content. What are the exact plans, can you give some details?
VPS usually cost around 40dls a month. If we own infrastructure, like dedicated servers then you can just run Virtualbox, Xen and make the dedicated server run their VPS from it. There are other options such as Amazon S3 which has a lower cost per bandwith or companies like Go-Grid which also provide a VPS infrastructure option.
Given the current budget, and the cheap prices for hosting or rental servers, I think it shouldn't be an issue of money. We need, however, to check some details. Maybe you can give answers to the questions above, so we can act soon. :-)
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