Public values and FOSS for education

The current digital educational system is dominated by tech giants. Fundamental rights, like the privacy, freedom, and sovereignty of children, parents, and educators are insufficiently secured. Ed-tech is mainly closed source and full of vendor lock-ins. Products are either overpriced, harvesting data, or both. The time to replace surveillance capitalist based Ed-tech by ethical open source alternatives is now.

We would like to build a European movement to create a free, sovereign alternative to the proprietary clouds offered by Big Tech that many kids are now forced to use. We know that there are many beautiful initiatives in several places, but mostly independent of each other. We would like to reach out to our international colleagues, join forces together and help each other to make serious impact.

With this group, we would like to:

Build and improve educational tools
Integrate existing FOSS tools to create a complete suite for schools
Develop deployment methods
Take legal action
Lobby at the EU

In this presentation, we want to share our strategy and what we have been working on in the Netherlands to get attention for public values in educational software and show FOSS alternatives.