Geert-Jan Meewisse and Raoul Kramer - Presenting the FOSS stack for schools

Abstract

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.

All the open source building blocks to create a fantastic sovereign public-values-by-design school IT environment are already out there. All that needs to be done is integrate it, tell schools that it’s not as scary as one might think, and say goodbye to BigTech.

In this presentation we’ll present the FOSS stack for schools, and the plan how to get there.

Biography

Geert-Jan Meewisse

Geert-Jan works as a freelance network designer, mainly for large enterprises and telco’s. He dedicates his spare time to restore sovereignty and freedom in the digital domain. He is one of the initiators of ‘The Coalition for Fair Digital Education’ (in Dutch: CEDO) – (this collation in not related to any political party). See eerlijkdigitaalonderwijs.nl

Geert-Jan is also coordinator of the Pirate party of Delft that works together with student-party STIP - the largest coalition party in Delft. Their goal is to make sure that Delft switches to open source and privacy-by-design solutions and publishes all non-private data as open data. See ibestuur.nl/nieuws/delftse-principes-voor-digitale-soevereiniteit

Raoul Kramer

Raoul helpt de publieke sector en non-profitorganisaties met het inzetten van open source software. Voor de CEDO is hij kwartiermaker en maakt hij zich hard voor een BigTech vrije, open source, software stack voor het onderwijs.

Sprekers