Philosophy/values of the website

The purpose of this website is to promote informed decision making about the use of open source software in schools. Our aim is to provide content which is informative and impartial, and relevant to educators in schools.

The website may include content which compares and contrasts open source and proprietary software. We will actively encourage constructive and informed debate about oss projects and will report and encourage constructive comments on the policies affecting the take up of software in schools.

We are aware that the history and development of open source software has engendered strong views and lively/fierce debates. There are many websites and organisations which continue to promote the views of the wide range of oss advocates. Given that our governing values are to be informative and impartial, it will not be appropriate for Open Source Schools to engage in such debates.

By contrast, our aim is to create a community of practitioners who can share experiences freely and openly, learn from each other and become informed users of open source software appropriate to their educational context.

Audience

While there are links to and newsfeeds from the developers of oss and we'd encourage those involved in open source development to engage in the community here, our main audience is teachers, heads and technicians in primary and secondary schools. The material on the website is therefore written with an essentially lay/non-technical audience in mind.

Your contributions

We would like actively to encourage all visitors to our site to share their own experiences of using open source software to enhance their teaching and learning. While you can add comments to articles or post comments in the forums without registering, you will need to register to upload new content.

Content moderation and editing

Forums (and comments at end of articles)

There will be no pre-screening of forum posts or comments. We wish to encourage wide ranging and free flowing discussion. However, the Open Source Schools team reserves the right to remove comments which are:

• inappropriate for debate among educational professionals
• defamatory
• needlessly aggressive or rude
• off-topic, irrelevant or inane

All other new content

All other new content will be subject to a process of moderation to ensure that the content:

• is consonant with the values/philosophy of this community website as described above
• is written in language appropriate to the website’s intended main audience
• meets standards of writing which would be expected by educational professionals of all levels visiting the site.

We'll review this policy from time to time, and will consider the views of the community and our other stakeholders in such a review.

Intellectual Property

All site content is published under a cc-by-sa licence. If you wish to create content for the site under alternative licence terms, please get in touch with the team via the contact form first.