Niels Hradek

Schools is where IT and software users of tomorrow are made, and next to teaching digital skills, educating on privacy and consequences of the use of different types of software and servcies plays an important role. We would like to report on various projects from the field.

Helping schools and teachers with using free software is far more involved than just selling a product. Where big companies have huge budgets for advertising and marketing, free software projects have to attract educators with the power of the community.

The most exciting upside of this is that our community does not only sell a product, but wants to get people involved. One of the benefits of free software for educators is that all our community goals play into their hands - free software is the basis of extending independence, democracy and all values modern schools are supposed to convey into the digital lives of students.

As a person or project getting involved with free software in education, there are many challenges and opportunities. Teckids and the projects around it have collected experience from the work with schools, teachers, political decision makers and free software developers that we would like to share with the community.

Other people: Dominik George

Young people obviously are big users of technology. While this carries its own legal questions, wanting children to be creative and maybe contribute to technology is a really difficult topic. Licences, hosting terms of service, contributor agreements - all these legal documents are made by adults, for adults, and minors often struggle to be able to agree them, even with parental consent. We want to look at what the issues are and raise awareness for the importance of contributions by children.

For many developers, contributing to open source projects is a trivial thing to do. Fire up GitHub, fork that project, do some changes, commit, push, create pull request - done! Also, for most project maintainers, getting contributions looks as easy - jsut have someone log in to GitHub, fork,… and so on.

But everyone of us also knows that most of the time, we do not care too much about analysing the terms we submit to. As a contributor, we don't really care about the project's licence as long as it is free, and as a maintainer, we expect contributors to do exactly that. Same goes for the terms of use of our favourite Git hosting service, translation tool, you name it.

One thing that makes things very easy for adult developers is that we are legally able to accept just about anything that might be written in such terms - but at least one subgroup of developers can't: children younger than a certain age limit.

• All US based websites are legally forced to prohibit registration by people younger than 13 years (simply put)
• German children are not allowed to accept any terms that cut legal rights they normally have
• …

If any free software project has children as a target group, we (the people at Teckids e.V.) strongly believe it should make contributions by minors as easy as its usage. This involves caring about all legal documents that might get in the way.

In this podium, we would like to raise some awareness and discuss experiences, ideas, possibilities, and the like in order to make the FOSS world a good place for everyone, independent of their age.

Other people: Dominik George

We want to discuss experiences, issues, and ideas concerning the use of free/open IM services among children and in education.

Instant Messaging is the one means of communication children and adolescents use in their free-time, and gets more important in education while classmates (or even worse, teachers) create chatrooms for their classes on non-free, privacy-unaware services. Teckids e.V. is tackling this issue in Germany, and we want to share our experiences in doing so.

What makes children use IM? What do they want or need? What are the difficulties in switching to a free/open service? What tools did we try, and how do they fit in?

We also want to listen to other people's experiences, and share thoughts on what developers of tools might need to take into account in order to make existing tools ready for use by children and in education.

Other people: Dominik George Philipp Stahl