Greenboard history starts back in the Beijing LUG early days when an orphanage contacted the group end of 2003. We spent a few months preparing for the project but unfortunately never got to deliver anything.

July 2007 during a trip to Qingdao, we got the chance to meet with Eson and his wife who happens to work at a primary school. After discussing the concept behind Open Education and answering various questions, Mrs Zhang was willing to start a trial in her school. A few important action items had to be completed on the technical side and local support was going to be provided by the then newly founded Qingdao LUG. Unfortunately issues with the school hardware gave the support team too many problems and the project has been on hold since. In parallel the Beijing LUG started a group called Educational Linux and continued to iron out the software solution.

Early 2008, Ben who had followed up with the project convinced his company (an international school) to donate their old PCs to a school for migrant workers' children and we were back on track with a replacement project geographically easier to manage for us. Having a beta software solution ready we could focus on teacher training and start to think about training materials and content delivery. Unfortunately the school seeing so much attention from an external community decided to seek out other donors, managed to received brand new PCs and decided to go the Windows way teaching how to use notepad to their pupils...

As the project was getting more mature we needed a different web infrastructure that the Beijing LUG couldn't accommodate (nor was it its purpose) and created Greenboard.org.cn. At the same time Dexxon was finalizing their Gdium which as wikipedia puts it "is a brick inside a wider environment dedicated to knowledge, namely a website providing access to hardware support, software compiled for MIPS and most specifically education resources to be used by teachers and their students.". Considering the very common goals of both projects, Dexxon hired the team core members so they can focus on finalizing a Chinese Open Source educational solution, finding local partners to bring resources and know-how Greenboard doesn't have and be able to professionally support new deployments.