We are convinced that young people can make an important contribution to the Free Software community. They see many things from a different perspective than adults, which is worth looking at more closely, because new ideas and points of view can be integrated into the development of free software. Since most children and young people are already in contact with the digital world at school, we want to involve young people in the development of software. In our presentation, we will show how we include the youth into the free software community with the schul-frei project. It shows educational establishments the advantages of free software and presents solutions they could use. The goals of the project are not to offer only software. It allows for example students and teachers to develop apps together for their school, which can be integrated into the running system we present.
Teckids e.V. is a German association which provides a legal frame for three technological projects. We manage the project called "schul-frei", which aims to bring digitisation with free software to schools. We especially value the participation of youth in these projects, because they are the people which are affected by digitisation the most. Our educational concept is also based around the idea that young people should be judged by their abilities, not by age. They should learn to take responsibility and be independent. An example of this would be the AlekSIS project. It is (mostly) developed by adolescents from Teckids e.V. and from the school Katharineum zu Luebeck, where it is actively used. AlekSIS is a web-based school information system which can be used to manage and/or publish organisational subjects of educational institutions. It is also part of the schul-frei canon and uses the EUPL. We also present and provide support for solutions such as Moodle or BigBlueButton for E-Learning and debianedu/skolelinux with Nextcloud for school networks on our website https://schul-frei.org/en/index.html We set up comprehensive platforms for schools, education and youth institutions in time for the increased demand for online teaching. This has contributed to the fact that more education providers are interested in these solutions and that the various projects are gaining in reach
Speakers: Benedict Suska