Holy shit! This is great presentation http://hello.p5js.org/

I work in an open-plan office and it's the most miserable thing in the world, even with headphones. After this I will never again accept a job without a private office.

While I was working in the Google Apps group a few years ago, we would bring in groups of teachers for focus groups and feedback on upcoming features for Apps.

My biggest takeway from those meetings was that educators have a really hard job, much harder than even what educated people assume. On top of actually being a useful educational tool, there are a ton of other boxes to check in order to get any kind of technology into the classroom:

* Compliance with the myriad of federal, state, and local laws surrounding education procurement, student data, what can and can't happen on government property and around children, and cash-strapped educational IT departments.

* Able to be simple enough for any educator to use and maintain, but also have enough features to add value as a educational tool.

* Bureaucracies and procurement policies that run the gamut: administrators, local government, state government, federal government, parents, the school board, the PTA, the teachers union, etc.

* Extreme price sensitivity.

* Long life: Even rich districts struggle to get budgets to upgrade technology regularly, and by regularly I mean every 2-4 years.

* The mechanics of running a classroom filled with children ... who would often rather spend a class period figuring out how to bypass a firewall to get to facebook, rather than half a class period writing.

Getting by all these requirements, and reaching educators at the end, requires a concerted, long running effort on the part of the company. We were lucky that Google had a running a edu program for Apps/Chrome and made it a priority. Consequently a lot of the core features of the offering are targeted specifically at educators:

* Strong central administrative control. In order to use your chromebook at all, you really need to log into your web account. It's only able to install things locally (and bypass administrative restrictions) if you really work hard to get around it. This helps get the tools approved by IT departments and administrators. Compare this to the fleets of windows machines or ipads that lots of IT departments have to maintain, where they basically solve the problem by re-imaging the machine regularly to wipe out locally installed apps.

* Price. Edu Google Apps accounts are essentially free. Compared to other computing solutions, Chromebooks are cheap and get the job done.

* Tools that both educators and students can use. The biggest selling point on apps is actually calendar. Gmail is great but most schools already have a email system in place. A calendar that syncs, has proper access control, is central to your school, and free, saves educators a lot of hassle. Once a teacher is hooked on calendar as a "gateway drug", it's not hard to take the leap. Docs, gmail, chrome, and chromebooks all have the same login, contact list, and access control. Being able to use these tools makes it easier to pass this knowledge onto the student.

* Maintenance: A student can work on one chromebook, drop it in water, and then immediately log onto another one and have all his work. Also for a educator in the classroom, it's easy to understand that refreshing the page will fix the problem 90% of the time.

* Shared home / school: A student can log onto his apps account at home, and get all his state as if he were still at school.

* Platform cross compatibility: Apps can work well on a Chromebook, but also will do a best-effort attempt on IE9 on windows. Apple's core philosophy has never tilted that way. This isn't just to adapt to varying levels of tech in classrooms, but also for taking the tools home.

* And finally, lots of bells and whistles that often get overlooked: ADA compliance, language support, student data compliance, etc.

All that being said, for young children, an iPad is an irreplaceable educational tool. I doubt any Google product has the kind of widespread appeal as iPads do among young children. Maybe YouTube, but even that is a stretch.

The bigger picture here is that the Wikimedia Foundation is apparently willing to spend donors' funds on defending the claimed right to publish this.

Is "professional photographers don't have the right to claim ownership over expensively set-up and finished work if an animal presses the shutter button" really an important principle of freedom of information worth fighting for?

Or is it more of a complicated case that may possibly be winnable through an arcane technicality in the US legal system, but even if successful would probably be less useful to the average Wikipedia-user than the equivalent amount spent on cleaning up existing copyright-free content. Nice as the image is, more useful and interesting stuff gets deleted from Wikipedia every day.

You do see it in other industries.

There's a similar push for basic financial literacy in schools - most people are not going to grow up to manage a hedge fund, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't learn about compound interest, debt, inflation, supply & demand, budgeting, equities, and business fundamentals. Managing your personal finances is a basic skill, and people who don't have it are severely hobbled today.

Many lawyers and civil rights organizations create "Here's the basics of the law" pamphlets, websites, and HN comments. Things ranging from who owns your IP when you moonlight, to what are your rights when the police pull you over, to what your responsibilities as a homeowner are, to what you should consider before getting married. These are not a substitute for trained legal advice, but they are hopefully enough to keep you from doing things that will cause legal problems later. And of course, 7th grade social studies in most American public schools teaches the foundations of the legal system and how laws are made and ratified.

Basic mental health is increasingly taught in public schools, along with what a healthy relationship looks like. A 16-year-old kid is obviously not going to be as good at regulating their emotions and perceiving those of others as a trained therapist, but particularly given the epidemic of domestic violence, it's been deemed important enough that we train our kids in basic psychology.

Everyone is expected to be able to write and communicate well, whether they're a journalist or not. We get decades of schooling on this, many colleges make "You will be able to write when you come out of here" a key selling point, and illiterate people tend not to do so well in modern developed nations. Journalists get more practice with this, but it's still considered to be a basic skill.

The progression for all of these is that the skill is initially associated with only a small number of practitioners, but eventually touches enough of people's day-to-day actions that the population requires a common base of knowledge to function. There was a time, a couple hundred years ago, when knowing how to read & write was not common knowledge, and largely restricted to lawyers and clergy. There was a time, barely 50 years ago, where common financial skills were pretty much restricted to business owners (you could argue that among people below about the 80th percentile in education, financial literacy is still uncommon). Emotional intelligence is currently a very scarce commodity. But the pattern is that as a skill becomes more fundamental to daily lives, the basics of that skill start getting taught to a broad base of people.

(Note, speaking for myself, not Microsoft!)

Pretty good article, only some minor inaccuracies.

Things I noticed:

1) Private offices are nowhere near gone. Some teams have "gone team room" (TFS), some have not (Roslyn). I've worked in both and personally don't care either way, but there are a number of people who heavily favor one or the other.

2) Visual Studio is technically a team, yes, but there are thousands of devs working on it. I think of my team as Managed Languages (Roslyn), not VS.

3) Development strategy is a continuous process and one we're still currently engaged in. We haven't just decided that this is the new process and we're not changing it again.

Oh, and some personal feelings: tooling isn't really mentioned in this article but it may be the most important. TFS and other teams have developed some quite good tools that help with the workflow considerably. If every dev is wasting time messing with bad tools, that's a huge amount of dev time wasted as an organization.