Shuttleworth Foundation
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[edit] History
South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth established the Shuttleworth Foundation in 2001, with the aim of driving social innovation in the field of education. The Foundation is built with the belief that education is the key to unlocking the creative and intellectual potential of the youth, inspiring them to believe that “anything is possible”.
[edit] Goals
The organisation drives social and policy innovation in the fields of education and technology, through policy dialogue and practical projects, and is currently focused on five broad themes:
- Educational leadership & management
- The promotion of communication & analytical skills
- Wireless & telecommunications regulation
- Collaborative content creation
- Intellectual property rights
[edit] Projects
[edit] tuXlabs
The Shuttleworth Foundation's tuXlab project was initiated in-house in 2002 with the purpose of establishing eighty open source software-based computer labs in schools in the Western Cape. Since then the project has expanded to a point where they have successfully installed more than 130 labs in 3 provinces and have now spun out into a sustainable company, Inkulueko technologies.
The primary objective of the tuXlab project is to create an innovative and replicable model for establishing cost-effective computing labs that can be utilised as a medium for delivering educational curriculum to the learners.
The project also seeks to develop a robust and sustainable open source volunteer community which will not only be able to service the existing tuXlab installations and provide momentum for new installations, but will also serve to broaden and deepen the open source software skills pool in the region. It is their hope that the volunteer group will one day be empowered enough to assume full control of the day-to-day running of the project.
The tuXlab project uses the skills and manpower of the Schools Linux User Group (SLUG) to install their tuXlabs. SLUG is a group of volunteers and was founded by Léhane Boonzaaier, Chandré de Wet, Gerald Webber and Wesley Breytenbach in order to facilitate the implementation of the tuXlab project.
[edit] The Freedom Toaster
A Freedom Toaster kiosk is placed at a school, library, shopping center or another public-accessible location. Users bring blank optical discs to the kiosk and select the software that they would like. The kiosk will then burn the selected software onto the users' media.
The name derives from this function. "Freedom" refers to the free and open source software provided and to the cost for using the system. "Toaster" is the Linux term for an optical disc burner.
