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Kurzer Bericht von der Veranstaltung “Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung?”

Gestern trafen sich sehr kurzfristig zwei Fellows und Kollegin um die Veranstaltung “Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung?” mit Constanze Kurz und Peter Schaar in Frankfurt zu besuchen. Jan Philipp Albrecht war ebenfalls als Podiums-Gast angekündigt, konnte aber leider nicht kommen.

Für Leute, die sich mit dem Thema beschäftigen, gab es nicht so viel Neues, aber es war mal wieder schön die Ereignisse und Argumente mundgerecht und zusammengefasst präsentiert zu bekommen.

Daneben empfand ich es als beruhigend und motivierend, dass dieses Thema noch eine Menge Leute interessiert und aus dem Haus zieht. Der Saal war voll (ich schätze es gab weniger als 10 freie Plätze). Außerdem wusste ich nicht wie unterhaltsam Peter Schaar sein kann.

Die Veranstaltung, oder Teile davon sollen am 16. März im ZDF zu sehen sein. Name der Sendung “Sonntags”. In der Mediathek wird der Beitrag dann hier erscheinen.

Ob die Situation besser mit technischen Mitteln oder mit politisch/rechtlichen Mitteln angegangen werden sollte war kein Streitpunkt, sondern es bestand Einigkeit darüber, dass dieses Problem auf allen Ebenen angegangen werden muss. Generell bestand unter den Diskutanten kaum Dissens so sehr sie auch danach suchten 🙂 Es ist fraglich in wie weit die Anwesenheit Jan Philipp Albrechts diese Situation besonders geändert hätte. Höchstens vielleicht in der Einschätzung welche Erfolgsaussichten der geplanten EU-Datenschutz-Grundverordnung eingeräumt werden.

Datenkrake

Kurz und Schaar äußerten wenig Hoffnung, dass in absehbarer Zeit etwas Substanzielles von der Politik kommen könnte. Constanze rief dazu auf, dass solange sich die Politik nicht bewegt, die Bürger mit den Füßen (bzw. den Fingern) abstimmen müssten und den datenfressenden Dienstleistern den Rücken kehren sollten. Es seien schließlich sie, die denen ihre Daten freiwillig gäben. Siehe dazu auch Karstens Artikel: Some things you can do to secure your communications

Kurz: schön sei, dass die NSA Affäre als Katalysator für viele Entwicklungen diene, dass man schon fasst dankbar sein muss, dass sie besteht. Das hatte ich mir in ähnlicher Form auch schon öfter gedacht.

Schaar betonte, dass wir mehr darauf pochen sollten, die Zweckmäßigkeit der massenhaften Überwachung zu überprüfen, denn bereits vorhandene Studien belegten, dass sie rein gar nichts zur nachgesagten Terror- oder Verbrechensbekämpfung beitrage.

Im Folgenden schreibe ich einfach stichpunktartig die Punkte auf, die ich sonst noch bemerkenswert fand:

  • Neben dem Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung gibt es auch das Grundrecht auf Gewährleistung von Vertraulichkeit und Integrität informationstechnischer Systeme. Das ist bisher von mir nicht wahrgenommen worden. Vielleicht geht es jemanden ähnlich.
  • Ich glaube Constanze verwandte den Begriff “Informationelle Gewaltenteilung“, der mir sehr gefiel und mich an Matthias Artikel erinnerte: Demokratie braucht Freie Software.
  • Ein weiterer Begriff, der mir gefiel, diesmal von Peter Schaar: die “eingeschliffenen Ohnmachts-Strukturen der EU” (in Bezug auf die NSA Affäre)
  • Im EU Jargon soll laut Schaar der Ausdruck “German vote” gebräuchlich sein, der gleichbedeutend ist mit “Enthaltung” :). Dieses vorhersehbare Abstimmverhalten führt er auf das föderale System zurück.
  • Der Moderator Heinz-Peter Höller deutete an, dass es bei BITKOM kürzlich “gefunkt” hätte aufgrund der Spannungen zwischen den deutschen Firmen und den amerikanischen Tochterunternehmen. Davon habe ich nichts mitbekommen. Weiß da jemand mehr? Update (3. März, 2014): Gemeint war wohl das hier: Bitkom streitet über Antworten zum NSA-Skandal

Fazit

Der Moderator erwähnte in seiner Zusammenfassung als Fazit: “Wir müssen also mehr verschlüsseln und mehr ‘Open Source’ nutzen.”  Das Schöne an dieser Bemerkung war, dass es mir schien als sei dies auch beim Publikum generell angekommen.

Als Constanze mal ins Publikum fragte: “Wer verwendet denn bereits GPG/PGP?“, hoben überraschenderweise ca. 30% der Anwesenden die Hand. Wow.

Also ein netter Abend, wenn es nur nicht so heiß gewesen wäre. Während die drei auf dem Podium sich jeder einen Liter Wasser reinkippen konnten, mussten wir im Publikum das mit ansehen und verdursten… 😉

Mehr davon können wir am kommenden Mittwoch beim Fellowship-Treffen in Frankfurt erzählen. Dann aber mit Getränken. 🙂

#ilovefs Thank you to Carsten Dominic and Bastien Guerry, developers of org-mode

Org-mode logo by Greg Newman (GPLv2+)
Today is “I love Free Software Day” again.  I used to have a little more to say on this occasion, but on the other hand there is not much more to say:

This year, my thanks go to Carsten Dominik, Bastien Guerry and all the others who helped them developing org-mode which made my live so much easier.

 

Working on FSFE’s education pages

In this post I want to share what is currently being discussed in the edu-team to get some more feedback to what the edu pages should look like. Please submit any comment or suggestion below, per email to the edu-team or this public etherpad.

The last thing we changed on the pages was the mission statement of the edu-team in 2012, so I guess it’s time for an update. We would like to provide much more background info than we currently do. But the first question is: what info do we currently provide? It turned out that I had no clue on what’s actually already there, but somewhat burried and hidden on fsfe.org.

I’ve started to go through the SVN and look for more edu related  content we may not be aware of. I grep’ed the SVN for certain keywords and put the result in an etherpad.  Now, we can start to sort and consolidate what we currently have and embed in what we want to have in the future. (Help welcome by the way.)

Tagging edu pages and list them automatically on the main edu page.

It would be nice if we could list every page that is tagged as edu content automatically so we wouldn’t have to keep up with new pages manually. Some pages are already tagged, but not consistently and I have to find out how to generate a neat list of them to integrate them on a page and am already in contact with Hugo who did the new design.

Something similar is already being done with the leaflets,  but the leaflets are not  advertised on the current edu pages. I would like to include them, automatically as well if possible, but separate from the other listing above.

Team page

Our plan was to set-up the edu-team page similar to the existing country team pages like France or Germany as they show all events and news that are tagged with the corresponding country code.

Edu News feed

I would like to include  a Free Software in education news feed, a planet like aggregator which  collects our blog entries to the matter. Björn mentioned a way how to convert rss feeds to a static page without the use of javascript which sounds like a nice solution to me. Until this is done, I could create short news entries whenever we publish something relevant in our blogs.

be transparent and inviting

I’d like to make the edu-team work more transparent and most of all more inviting to contributers. Maybe by promoting some of our tasks that wait for someone who picks them up.  We could just refer to the ticket system we have been using to collect ideas and tasks. This very bullet  point is issue #25 by the way 🙂 The tickets #16 and #19 are good examples for tasks anybody could pick up and complete, don’t you think?

At the same time, I want to encourage people to submit new tasks they deem important to be done. Of course, with our limited resources, we’ll have to focus on what we think is most important and leave the rest to somebody else. Bottom line is: We want to make it easy and clear how to help us and how to get involved.

What else?

  • Promote the possibility to edit the wiki pages where we collect all kind of data and texts (#23).
  • Promote the possibility to submit edu news for the summaries I’ve been posting and/or to the  news feed I mentioned above that needs to be set up. In January I started to ask people using this pad for this among other ways and it was actively being used.
  • Provide an easy way for feed-back. Something like  “How can we make this page more useful? Please mail your ideas to edu-team@…”
  • We want to provide good case studies, samples of good (non-discriminating) policies, sientific material, etc.. Until we have a revised and condensed collection of good resources, we can make use of the links we already have in the wiki.
  • Create and  provide “target group” specific info/flyers like teachers or advocates.
  • Provide good resources where to get more info including practical information (maybe also target group specific as with the leaflets)

I am looking forward to any feed-back. Until then, we’ll start implementing the things above step by step. 🙂 Any help is welcome!

Fellowship Meeting in Darmstadt

Last Wednesday, we finished our first round around Frankfurt with our Fellowship meeting in Darmstadt. Twelve Free Software enthusiasts met at Kneipe 41 and had delicious Pizza and drinks. I’ll list a fraction of the various topics below. On top of all the interesting things we discussed, it was a lot of fun again!

After everybody got something to eat, we did a brief introduction round to get to know each other (there were so many new faces!). We discussed the topics of the agenda and a lot more after that. Good thing we did have an agenda as the topics were a little too nerdy for some of the attendees (including me) before the “official part” started. And after that, various independent discussions took place at the same time that covered everybody’s interest I suppose.

Firstly, we spoke about the upcoming AbiCamp in Dreieich which some of us plan to attend.

In this regards, Alexander pointet also to “Chaos macht Schule“.

Ana told us about her project: aDTN – Undetectable communication in wireless delay-tolerant networks: “aDTN is a network layer protocol for wireless delay-tolerant communication that ensures that an external attacker cannot link network participants to each other nor to the messages they send.” Such a network would be useful during demonstrations etc.  She’s looking for more contributers by the way.

In this context, we also talked about BitMessage

We talked again about our plans for Document Freedom Day and that educational institutions are in the focus this year.

The upcoming “I love Free Software” day (#ilovfs)

Upcoming Cryptoparties in Frankfurt (Feb 22nd) and Mannheim (Feb 23rd). As cryptoparties are an excellent opportunity to point out the importance of Free Software to an interested audience, we should show up at these events and raise awareness. Unfortunately, I won’t make it to either one of them this month, but I am confident that Free Software will be presented anyway.

fsfe.org has a new design and asks for Feedback!

Italy puts FS first

After the various recommendations of C30C talks in January, “Seeing the secret state, six landscapes” was added to the list.

Circumvention Tech Summit Berlin

And countless other topics I didn’t bother to write down or didn’t get aware of as the table was too long to follow all conversations at once 🙂 I hope that we’ll get a somewhat complete list of topics in the wiki by the end of the month.

And finally: Dirk had some interesting thoughts how “sapere aude” relates to Free Software. As I said in the beginning, this was fun again including the commute to and from Darmstadt.

I am looking forward to the next meeting one in Frankfurt! 🙂

Free Software in Education NEWS – January

Here’s what I collected in January. If you come accross anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note, dump it in this pad or even better: drop it on the edu-eu mailinglist!

FSFE Edu-Team activities

We are still working on the edu pages on FSFE although I haven’t had much time for it this month. Although I did manage to grep the SVN of fsfe.org to find edu related articles that are scattered around the site. Now, we can start to sort and consolidate what we currently have and embed in what we want to have in the future. This and everything else we’ve been planning will be put in a separate posting. If you have any input on that, please drop us a line!

We received and replied to a few inquiries, one was if the content of our edu leaflet may be used in derivative works. They may. We will relicense them under CC-BY-SA 4.0 eventually to make this obvious to everybody.

Sebastian pointed me to CodeCombat, a game designed to learn programming. I haven’t had the chance to look at it yet, but it sounds cool. 🙂

Community

Great article by Gregg Ferrie on how to Upgrade your school to Free Software! I read it only once, but I definitely have to get back to it soon. Among a lot of other things, it contains a link to scientific research on the benefits of thin clients.

Another great report on Joinup about a Croatian group conducting Software workshops and attract students. I’d like to contact these folks and hope that I’ll get to it some time.

University of Graz, Austria awarded the E-Learning Champion 2013 – their highest remunerated award for excellence in teaching to Gerald Senarclens de Grancy for his courses “Computational Management Science” 1 and 2. Both courses teach basic programming skills to business students. However, it is to be pointed out that the price was awarded because the courses fundamentally use and promote Free Software, open (web) standards and open content (German). This benefits, among others, platform-independent mobile learning. Congratulations!

Charlie Reisinger explains how they prepared 1725 laptops in a two day weekend using the the FLDT system. Pretty impressive… The procedure is also discussed on the Debian/edu mailing list.

On the edu mailinglist of Apirl (French), they discuss if the switch-off for MS XP support isn’t a perfect opportunity to switch to Free Software.

The KDE edu list gained quite some momentum. This months several people offered help on developing edu applications, namely parley, labPlot 2 (see software news), kgeography and kmplot.

Santiago Ferreira Litowtschenko pointed to USB4butia, a free (as in Freedom) input/output board. The project BUTIÁXhas more info (in Spanish).

EducationFreedomDay.org took place on January 18

RoboSchool, a 5 day workshop dealing with robotics, is taking place in Chemnitz, Germany. I don’t know how much Free Software will be used there, but as Markus Dittman is involved, I guess FS will be used. Does anybody know more about it?

The General Assembly of FRISK  took place in Oslo-Trondheim, Norway

An Arduino workshop for teachers took place in Damme, Germany

Government

Edu software

Alexander Semke announced the first stable version of LabPlot2 on the KDE edu mailing list.

Distro news

Skolelinux: Petter Reinholdtsen asked if anybody knows how the Skolelinux Live 7.1 was made. There was no response on the mailing list yet. Anyone?

Aseem Sharma had a look at four kids distros (namely Quimo, Ubermix, Edubuntu and Sugar) and explains his argumentation why kids should be exposed to Free Software early

Other news

Google Research ran a pilot to teach kids computer science and shared their findings after 31 after-school programs for 4th-12th grades.

First and not so surprising but still worth mentioning:

Students were most engaged when they had a creative outlet or where there was a big “wow-factor”. They were less engaged with tools that were strongly scaffolded for learning and did not result in a creative result. In this initial set of pilots, students were most engaged with Scratch and App Inventor.

Pretty much in the same direction goes this interview with a teacher and these four projects for parents to teach their kids about open hardware and electronics by Dave Neary.

Not directly related to Free Software, but it is still interesting to keep an eye on the current market development:Microsoft loses marketshare massively to Chromebooks in the US schools.

Future Events

I am especially happy, that the pad to submit more edu news has been used by some people. This makes this work much more fun! Thanks to all contributors!

Fellowship Meeting Rhein/Main in Frankfurt – Jan 2014

Last Wednesday, we had our first Fellowship Meeting in Frankfurt this year. Unfortunately, some people could not come for various reasons, but we had a nice, entertaining and very informative meeting nevertheless at Cafe Albatros.

Thanks “Sissi” for the tip! We had to find an alternative location quickly as the Club Voltaire had an event scheduled for this day.

We talked about a million things, most of them are covered in the minutes listed in the event entry.

As planned I mentioned a few key events and activities to wrap up the past year and made it a quick overview on what we will be up to in the upcomming months, like:

I am looking forward to a very busy year 2014 with this crowd! 🙂

Free Software in Education NEWS – December

Here’s what I collected in December. If you come accross anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note, dump it in this pad or even better: drop it on the edu-eu mailinglist!

FSFE Edu-Team activities

We’ve still been working on the NL Edu campaign and restructuring on the education pages on FSFE. If you have any input what can be improved or something you would like to see in this category, please let us know!

Sebastian wrote a blog post about the hackdays and hackathons in Berlin to get young people involved in hacking. The TSB Technologiestiftung provides the Hackingbox which contains

  • 12 Raspberry Pis including 8G SD-Card, power supply and case
  • 12 Makey Makeys
  • 12 Fritzing Starter Kits with Arduino

Some Edu-Team members will meet at FOSDEM. If you are there, please stop by FSFE’s booth and ask!

Community

A post by Shauna Gordon-McKeon that describes how OpenHatch brings Free Software to Campus and how they scaled “in a box”

Sridhar Dhanapalan writes about “Creating an Education Programme

Here a quick quote as a teaser: Their education programme “highly values teacher empowerment and community engagement”:

“We have a responsibility to invest in our childrens education it is not just another market. As a not-for-profit, we have the freedom and the desire to make this happen. We have no interest in vendor lock-in; building sustainability is an essential part of our mission. We have no incentive to build a dependency on us, and every incentive to ensure that schools and communities can help themselves and each other.”

And another quote:

We provide a copletely unlocked environment, with full access to the root user and the firmware. Some may call that dangerous, but I call that empowerment. If a child starts hacking on an XO, we want to hire that kid.

There were more reports from Sahun (see previous Edu-Posting)

Edu software

Future events

 

Free Software in Education NEWS – November

Here’s what I collected in November. If you come across anything that might be worth mentioning in this series, please drop me a note or, even better: drop it on the edu-eu mailinglist!

Edu-Team:

We, and most of all Kevein, are still working behind the scenes on the NLedu campaign.

The German Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) published a whitepaper on Free Software in education (German) Sebastian already wrote a quick review about it.

Alejandra reports that the  University Rey Juan Carlos  who offers an Software Libre master degree is looking for open communities to collaborate with them. As part of the master their students have to contribute with a Free Software community so they are willing to have communities that could offer activities to the students so they learn about Free Software.

Community

Richard Stallman spoke at Universidad Carlos III (Madrid, Spain) in December on why schools need to ensure that the software will be free to teach.

Framablog: How Microsoft fancies education in France (or something like that. My French went from bad to worse. Je suis désolé.) Actual title L’école selon Microsoft : comment j’ai appris à ne plus m’en faire et à aimer l’éducation privatrice et fermée

Apropos speaking French: This is supposed to be edu related, but I didn’t manage to grasp much and stopped listening to this podcast after 20 minutes: Le RDV Tech #121 – Spécial éducation. The shownotes mention http://code.org/ and http://aful.org so I suspect it’s justified to mention it here without having an actual clue 🙂

Essay on how to “Prepare students for a rapidly changing world by teaching with open source

A Free Software in education workshop took place in Zaragoza, Spain

Audrey Watters looks at the tablet market in schools

Open hardware for education with littleBits library of electronic modules The circuits are licensed under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 1.2. and available on github

How to train college students to contribute to the Linux kernel (by Luis Ibanez) Teaser: The key is to start with very easy patches just to get used to git and the like.

Polish case study: Free Software faster and cheaper.

Government

Spain’s Galicia to research open source-cloud use in schools

quite long article on the Free Software situation in UK, which also covers education in one paragraph (Search for “School monopoly”).

Edu Software

What Is New for KTouch in KDE SC 4.12

Interview about SALSA (Styled & Accessible Learning Service Agreements)

Sylvain wrote (in French) about Sketcholt, a web whiteboard for schools.

Another sugar digest by Walter Bender

SUGAR activity report in Spanish (as far as I could understand)

Upcoming events

As always, if you have any info on news or events that might be of interest to Free Software activists in education, please let me know or dump it on the edu-eu mailing list!

First Fellowship meeting in Aschaffenburg

The third trip of our scheduled tour around Frankfurt went to Aschaffenburg (Just added the location to OpenStreetMap). Although one thought behind these excursions was to keep the commute of the Fellows short, only two of the 6 Fellows actually came from or near Aschaffenburg 🙂 We had two newcomers, one of them from Frankfurt.

After a short introduction of those who didn’t know each other, we chatted about the particularities of Aschaffenburg, public transportation and the Liberario App, gadgets, the history of Palm and Nokia and heard anecdotes from various Chaos Communication Congresses.

FSFE related, we talked about our recent achievements at the Cryptoparties in Frankfurt and forged further plans for the next one. I pointed to the latest newsletter with the timeline of FSFE’s achievements which is a nice resource to refer to when people ask: What is FSFE actually doing?

We talked a little bit about Jacob Appelbaum as the most recent famous Fellow and his quote for the Fellowship page. I forgot to mention that we are still looking for more quotes for the website, but will do this in this posting and on the mailing list 🙂

We talked about possible activities for Document Freedom Day 2014 and whether or not it may be combined with the TheyDontWantYou.to campaign. We concluded that this may probably not be the best idea, but we may issue stickers to youths and kids if they happen to show up on the event that still has to be decided on.

Sven brought up the idea to use a shared Twitter account to announce and promote our local activities to a broader audience. I think this may work out very well. But what I personally would really like if we had an easy way to pump our messages to various social networks automatically. Friendica may be an option here, but I don’t want to neglect my other commitments by looking any further into that. Any suggestions that may save me the time?

As it was a long evening, there was most likely more stuff worth mentioning, but I stop here. It may be added to the minutes in the wiki.

Fellowship Treffen in Frankfurt im November

Gestern gab es wieder ein Fellowship-Treffen in Frankfurt. Es fanden sich wieder 7 Menschen zusammen um über Freie Software und gaplante Aktionen zu sprechen. Kurze Themenübersicht, die sich auch im Wiki für Ergänzungen findet.

ECM Bericht

Ich gab einen kurzen Überblick über das Treffen ähnlich dem von Lucile  und Hugo über Infrastruktur und Tips für Treffen:

 TheyDontWantYou.To

die TheyDontWantYou.To Kampagne startete am Montag. Mehr dazu sicher in einem späteren Eintrag.

 CryptoParty Frankfurt

Die nächste Cryptoparty findet am 30. Nov statt.

  • https://cryptoparty.in/Frankfurt
  • geplanter Flyer dazu
  • mögliche Themen für Fortgeschrittenere:
    • md5checksum (vor Software-installationen)
    • Keymanagement
    • Beziehungsanalyse durch web-of-trust

 Polarfuxcon

Nach der Fuxcon im Sommer ist im Jan/Feb eine “Polarfuxcon” geplant. Diesmal ohne Vorträge, nur Socializing und netzwerken zwischen den Gruppen.

Weitere Themen

Also dann bis zum nächsten mal in Aschaffenburg! 🙂