Here are some of the thoughts on building a Education Content Server for educational institutes.
The content server for education, is a server located locally in the school/college premises. This server has all the content such as software, documentations and source code, that is available for free. This content is replicated through a central server and each of these local servers are accessible to the outside world as well. This is similar to the model used by Tucows.com which is leading network of download servers.
The local server will be situated in each of institute. It will replicate from the central server. The replication can happen through the Internet or incase Internet connectivity is not available through CDs sent out every month.
Each local server will also act as a local mirror and if it is connected to the Internet, anyone can access this content within or outside the institute.
FOLD Stands for:
Free Software
Open Source
Linux
Documentation
This will have all the free software and open source software. The source code of all these applications will also be available.
This brings in all the latest applications, source codes, documentations, etc available locally in the institute’s premises. The student can use this as well as contribute code back. There would be a local CVS mirror which updates the central CVS server which updates the global CVS server.
The documentation would consists of all the free technical documentation as well as important and useful information such as tax laws, government notifications, forms for passport and other utilities; important telephone numbers,emails and contacts. It will also have all the student project reports and other things contributed by the students.
Each local server will also have a search facilty to search through all this content. Each local server front-end can be customised by the institute with their branding such as logo. They can also have additional sections put up their local content on the server.
What else can this be used for?
For example, if the government wants to release a document say the budget. Why should it be released only on the Ministry of Finance site? This document can be released on FOLD which is replicated across all the servers at each of the institutes which are connected to the Internet and a user can download the document from any of the servers.
Example Sites which do similar thing:
Sourceforge.net
Freshmeat.net
Tucows.com