On 2nd februari 2025, we were welcomed at Fosdem to talk about “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.
Watch our talk here:
A note on Google sponsorship of FOSDEM
Imagine a conference about a better environment and climate change, organised by Greenpeace to share knowledge about making society more sustainable. Could you imagine this conference being sponsored by Exxon Mobil? That is green washing operation of the worst kind.
To us the sponsoring by Google is exactly this: a green washing operation to legitimise a company that opposes the values of free software in every way thinkable. Then why did we go anyway and participated in FOSDEM? Well we could go to Offdem and reach only people who already agree with us, or we could go to FOSDEM and speak out. We choose the latter.
Project Maven and Nimbus
Google trains its algorithms on any data it collects. That is what is meant by “And we use your information to make improvements to our services” (source: Google privacy policy 16 september 2024 form a Dutch school login portal) This includes the data produced by or children in our schools. These algorithms are not free software but proprietary. And can also be used for military purposes in project Maven, since this is also ‘a Google service’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven
Project Maven is now continued and extended in project Nimbus sold to Israël. Google employees participating in ‘no tech for apartheid’-protests are fired: (Dutch news paper, paywal) https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/01/23/google-assisteert-het-israelische-leger-direct-met-project-nimbus-a4880701 or English news https://theintercept.com/2024/05/01/google-amazon-nimbus-israel-weapons-arms-gaza/
On top of this, Google has now finally withdrawn the promise not to use AI technology for weapons, after not keeping this promise anyway but now it is official: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/business/google-ai-weapons-surveillance/index.html
Ethical baseline
To us, FOSDEM should have a minimal ethical baseline that sponsors should respect. That is at least:
- Respect the 4 freedoms of free software
- Respect basic human rights, so:
- No participation in mass surveillance
- No participation in apartheid
- No participation in genocide
Google fails on all of the above, that’s why we deem their sponsorship a problematic green washing operation that FOSDEM should put an end to.