WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:09.840 I'm Bonnie Merring from the Free Software Foundation Europe, and today I'm presenting 00:09.840 --> 00:12.560 you packing for freedom to you. 00:12.560 --> 00:18.480 Most of you in the room are not the target group, but I hope that you will share the news 00:18.480 --> 00:26.040 of you packing for freedom with the target group who is between 14 to 18, so yeah. 00:26.040 --> 00:32.360 And if this I will start, you're packing for freedom as the FSF East Programming Competition. 00:32.360 --> 00:36.560 And yeah, what is it, what is it all about? 00:36.560 --> 00:45.640 We have this competition where you come up with your own idea and program this idea. 00:45.640 --> 00:50.160 This is the very unique part about it to be honest, because a lot of competitions that 00:50.160 --> 00:56.920 you may be aware of, they propose ideas, they hand out ideas, and with us, the teenagers 00:56.920 --> 01:01.960 come up with this idea, and this makes it very special, because there are so many great 01:01.960 --> 01:08.280 ideas you can't believe this, because all of the students and all the people participating, 01:08.280 --> 01:13.200 they are very creative, and they have a lot of ideas in mind, and I will come to those ideas 01:13.200 --> 01:17.720 later, but I just wanted to prep you for this very unique competition. 01:20.240 --> 01:29.360 The idea, everything is possible, everything, we have a lot of ground from music to very 01:29.360 --> 01:37.960 techy and geeky ideas, the only requirement it needs to be free software, so this is basically 01:37.960 --> 01:43.880 the whole thing that needs to be in the end, you know that this is quite complex, so we 01:43.960 --> 01:53.200 do have this, but before we start, with the electromagnetic criteria and who are participating, 01:53.200 --> 01:58.680 I just wanted to point out that this makes all of the programs that are assigned to this 01:58.680 --> 02:05.680 competition, and that are submitted, are easy to use, study, share, and improve by others 02:05.680 --> 02:12.240 as well, so this makes it also very special, sing about it that they programs that are 02:12.320 --> 02:18.040 submitted are also around there for the next competition, and that people start getting back 02:18.040 --> 02:25.640 to them, and they work on those, so it's also very much in this period of free software, the 02:25.640 --> 02:31.520 teenagers as already mentioned before are between 14 and 18, they are from Europe, so it's 02:31.520 --> 02:37.960 not a you, and they don't need to have European citizenship, so also refugees are welcome 02:38.040 --> 02:45.400 to join us, and yeah, that's the people that are supposed to participate, and if you know 02:45.400 --> 02:49.560 some teachers, if you know somebody to share this with please do because we are still open 02:49.560 --> 02:55.320 for registration, and with this I will start about the concrete competition and what's actually 02:55.320 --> 03:00.840 happening there, we have a programming phase that's first we have to register the phase then 03:00.920 --> 03:08.600 programming and the evaluation, evaluation, prices, and awards ceremony, the programming phase 03:08.600 --> 03:13.800 started in January, and it goes until June, so it's six months, and those six months, as I 03:13.800 --> 03:19.000 already mentioned, they come up with their own idea, with their own project, their work on this 03:19.000 --> 03:30.040 project, and they submitted in the end of June, I'm not sure if you can actually be 03:30.040 --> 03:35.960 Carcourt because it's a bit awful, but you can see that your else is also easy to remember, 03:37.800 --> 03:43.000 as already said, you can still join us, we are more than happy to still welcome people into 03:43.000 --> 03:50.680 the onboard people, yeah, and there will be an extra one, so if this one is too late for you, 03:51.960 --> 03:57.320 we do support those teenagers during the whole programming phase, we have monthly calls, 03:57.320 --> 04:02.840 in which we put an input topic, and discuss this with them, there's time for questions, 04:02.840 --> 04:08.760 and you can meet new people in the breakout rooms, friendship, friendships, 04:08.760 --> 04:13.800 have been made through this, and yeah, it's very nice, the input topic in those monthly 04:13.800 --> 04:19.240 video calls that we are range from free software topics to like virtualize and should I choose, 04:19.240 --> 04:26.360 how do I make my software available, like we are get, how do I stay motivated, 04:26.440 --> 04:31.720 because six months as you can imagine is quite a long time, especially for teenagers who also have 04:31.720 --> 04:37.480 to focus on school, and yeah, a lot of other things in their minds, so six months is for them, 04:37.480 --> 04:43.320 it's a huge timeframe, and it's quite a challenge also for them to stay motivated and to stay, 04:44.360 --> 04:50.280 up to the top with their project, because sometimes they become very entangled in small problems, 04:50.280 --> 04:54.680 as you can imagine teenagers, they are sometimes like, oh, this is a pattern that I need to 04:54.680 --> 05:00.600 solve, and then they are really invested in this specific topic, so we try to help with this, 05:00.600 --> 05:07.400 as well in those monthly calls, with project planning, how do I do this, how do you keep going, 05:07.400 --> 05:13.960 when you have a drawback, for example, so we really want to support them in this kind of topic, 05:14.680 --> 05:19.880 but we cannot offer, and what we always say to the kids then who participate, 05:20.520 --> 05:25.880 we cannot offer programming help, because this is not our speciality, as the efforts of 05:25.880 --> 05:32.120 EVO for legal help, we offer, as I said, programming and project management help, but programming 05:32.120 --> 05:38.440 is something they need to figure out on their own or which other teachers, because as I said it 05:38.440 --> 05:43.160 before, it's free software, and in this period of free software, there should be a community, 05:43.160 --> 05:48.760 there should be more than just this one kid working on their project, it's supposed to be like 05:48.760 --> 05:53.640 reaching out to others, it's supposed to connect with others and to, yeah, also learn what 05:53.640 --> 05:59.720 free software is about, not only to submit their whole project in the end, yeah, that's what we do in 05:59.720 --> 06:05.880 those monthly calls, after this input topic and the discussion, because there usually quite a lot 06:05.880 --> 06:11.880 of questions then about the topic, like how to use, get, how to visualize institutes, et cetera, 06:12.760 --> 06:18.600 we do the breakout rooms and in those rooms, we mix the kids up together and yeah, let them 06:18.600 --> 06:23.560 just talk about their project for a few minutes and so they can connect with others from all over 06:23.560 --> 06:28.840 Europe, and this is also quite a challenge, because English is the language that's needed for 06:28.840 --> 06:34.440 this whole programming competition, but yeah, this is also very nice, then you drop in, then in 06:34.440 --> 06:39.560 those breakout rooms, you see that I don't know, the person from Spain is talking to the person 06:39.560 --> 06:46.760 from Portugal or from Poland, and they really connect and it's very unique about this competition 06:47.000 --> 06:53.800 as well as how much the kids interact with each other, so this is, yeah, as I said, 06:53.800 --> 06:59.720 for us have been made there and it's really, really nice to see those kids there, yeah, this is, 07:01.320 --> 07:05.480 I really like those monthly calls, I don't know if it just came across, but I think they are 07:06.440 --> 07:13.080 also something that makes this competition very fun and very much a competition that you should share 07:13.080 --> 07:23.320 and share. And with this, yeah, I would say the most important thing is to have fun during this 07:23.320 --> 07:29.640 whole competition and to meet other people, to learn more about free software as well and to 07:29.640 --> 07:36.280 come up with the own project idea to realize this and in the end to get rewarded for this, and now 07:36.360 --> 07:44.760 I will come to the evaluation, how do we evaluate those projects? But we have a jury with a lot of experts 07:46.280 --> 07:50.600 as you can see there are a lot of people, maybe people you already know, so they are free software 07:50.600 --> 07:57.800 project maintainers, coordinators, researchers, teachers and yeah, all of them bring their unique 07:57.880 --> 08:06.760 history, so they have like, a speciality in LLMs or they know more about cryptographic topics, 08:06.760 --> 08:13.160 so they really bring a lot of expertise to the jury, they look at the submitted projects 08:13.160 --> 08:18.840 and they come up with a short list of around 12 projects and those 12 are then invited for an 08:18.840 --> 08:25.080 interview session and yeah, in this interview session, we talk about the participant about the 08:25.080 --> 08:35.720 project, we also come up with the idea, we basically find out how much they want to continue with 08:35.720 --> 08:40.040 this project, how they did this project and all of those questions that are important for the 08:40.040 --> 08:47.800 jury. Yes, and then in September, the six winners are contacted and are announced. 08:48.120 --> 08:56.520 Yes, that's the evaluation process which takes from July to December because as you can 08:56.520 --> 09:02.040 imagine with a lot of experts and all of them doing this in their volunteer time, it takes some time 09:02.040 --> 09:07.800 to get all those people together in our room and to have all the projects evaluated that are 09:07.800 --> 09:15.480 on the short list and in the end those are the prices for the winners, they are very nice, I 09:15.720 --> 09:24.120 would say. So the first price is 4,000 euros, the second price is 2,048 and third to six, 09:24.120 --> 09:31.320 I would love to highlight that there are three special prices, so it's not like there's the place 09:31.320 --> 09:36.440 four fifth and six, but those are special prices that be hand out, I don't know for example for 09:37.320 --> 09:43.960 the best young purchase event because there's at least had there's 14 to 18 and this is quite a 09:44.040 --> 09:50.600 difference. So a 14-year-old one has a different knowledge of different understanding of programming 09:50.600 --> 09:56.760 then an 18-year-old one and we do take this into account. So for example a special price, 09:57.960 --> 10:10.600 we try to highlight those parts. Now about the projects, this is also my favorite part because 10:10.680 --> 10:16.120 this is such something that I love to share how creative those kids are and it's so impressive 10:16.120 --> 10:20.840 because when I think back what I did with 14, I would never have come up with this idea. 10:20.840 --> 10:27.000 This is one of our youngest participants and he came up with a game engine so that others can 10:27.000 --> 10:35.560 easily develop their own games. It's 3, it's not 3D but it's very nice idea and so I would say 10:35.560 --> 10:42.200 complex idea and he did this in only three months because he first had a different approach and 10:42.200 --> 10:46.600 he first started with another project and then he was like he got stuck and he could not 10:47.160 --> 10:52.600 really do this project because he realized it's not my full heart is in this project so he came 10:52.600 --> 10:58.040 up with a new project and that's why we also have those six months so that once you get stuck you 10:58.040 --> 11:03.400 can come up with another project, you can do something else and he did this in order in three months 11:03.400 --> 11:12.040 so it was quite impressive. Then we had an open radio, I don't know if you know that but sometimes 11:12.040 --> 11:17.400 on your phone you want to have I don't know for example an alarm with a radio and all and sometimes 11:17.400 --> 11:24.920 this is very hard with free software and heated an open radio also very nice and cool solution 11:25.480 --> 11:35.400 and then we had the winner this was a duro plot as you can see it puts the data from a micro 11:35.400 --> 11:43.800 controller into graphics this was a bit of a more complex project this was the winner in 2023 and 11:43.800 --> 11:52.120 yeah it showed the data input into a graphical way he is also very much in robotics and yeah this 11:52.200 --> 11:57.800 is more for a very complex topic then because you have life data that you need to transform and 11:57.800 --> 12:03.160 yeah this was very impressive as well and as you can already see from all of those projects 12:03.800 --> 12:10.920 there are a lot of things that they come up with. We also had the one guy who used entry 12:10.920 --> 12:17.400 the printer for a smart table assistant for people that are have a disability and can't move 12:17.400 --> 12:25.320 on their own easily so he printed a whole smart table that you can control for micro controller 12:25.320 --> 12:31.240 and then moves around it goes to the person that's in the wheelchair or in the bad and yeah you 12:31.240 --> 12:38.200 can put drinks in it you can put food in it and you can then also put it bring it back to the 12:38.200 --> 12:44.200 dishwasher and yeah it's easy and it's a handy tool for people with disabilities he 12:45.080 --> 12:51.800 3D printed a whole thing he was from Barcelona and that's how he came up with the design because it's 12:53.400 --> 13:03.160 yeah it looks a bit like the very famous church there and those are the winners from the first round 13:04.440 --> 13:13.160 and yeah he had a lot of ideas there and this was then the second round as you can see it changed 13:13.240 --> 13:17.880 now we also have a batch which we do in a workshop with them that is also a very fun part 13:17.880 --> 13:22.200 during the whole of Barcelona money so get the kids together and to your program the 13:22.200 --> 13:30.840 batch that you can see there and this is also a very fun thing and about this I would now start 13:30.840 --> 13:38.520 with the other money their water and money is in Brussels and in October yeah it's a weekend a full 13:38.520 --> 13:46.120 weekend that we cover we invite the participants who's one parent to join us there and it's a 13:46.120 --> 13:53.160 vernacular it's a one weekend full of networking meeting new people making friends ceremony plus dinner 13:54.360 --> 13:59.960 and yeah it's very nice to be there and it's very nice to see the kids and action and to actually 13:59.960 --> 14:05.080 meet them in person because there is a difference to meeting them in front of the laptop and then 14:05.240 --> 14:10.760 see them in person but the most important thing is we have a lot of food you need this whole week and 14:10.760 --> 14:21.640 nobody goes ever hungry yeah who is the person organizing this well as I already said it's the program 14:21.640 --> 14:26.360 in competition of the free software foundation Europe and the people taking care of this whole 14:26.360 --> 14:32.360 competition are Alex and me yeah we are guiding the kids through the whole six months 14:33.160 --> 14:37.480 organizing the monthly calls organizing their water money and we are also 14:38.600 --> 14:44.280 therefore questions and yeah somebody needs some more motivation if you will always try to do that 14:47.160 --> 14:54.440 and please share the registration please share this with your colleagues kids in your 14:55.560 --> 15:01.880 area because it is quite a hard competition we know that we try to help as much as possible 15:01.880 --> 15:10.200 and it is a very fun thing for the kids to be in but kids tend to be perfectionists they want to 15:10.200 --> 15:18.760 have a very perfect project in the end and otherwise if you sometimes that this is not enough and 15:18.760 --> 15:23.880 this is something I would like to really let you know that this is always something that we try to 15:23.880 --> 15:30.600 encourage the kids to do as to head in everything they do because it's something that it's very 15:31.560 --> 15:37.160 yeah that's something they're doing the whole six months they've worked on the project and they 15:37.160 --> 15:41.640 put a lot of work into it and it's something that's very nice so please share this registration 15:42.440 --> 15:46.440 let it know a lot of others know that we are still open for registration and that we would 15:46.440 --> 15:52.280 lock to have kids from all over Europe and not trust people with European citizenship but 15:52.280 --> 16:00.120 everybody who is living in Europe we also have an influence so if you would like the 16:00.120 --> 16:05.080 subscribe feel free to join us there we share a regular information about the competition 16:05.880 --> 16:10.360 about the next programming phase and yeah about how it's going 16:13.160 --> 16:17.080 it can see people scanning the QR code they will leave us open for a minute 16:22.840 --> 16:27.560 and please also follow us on my side on as I already said people share this information there as well 16:28.200 --> 16:32.440 I am now open for your questions and I hope you have some 16:34.440 --> 16:36.440 yes please 16:46.280 --> 16:53.720 so participation around 90 is usual so currently we have around 70 people participating already from 16:53.800 --> 17:00.600 all over Europe sorry I forgot to repeat the question so how many people participate and how many 17:00.600 --> 17:09.400 people actually finished the project so 90 is usually the average number we had competitions and 17:09.400 --> 17:17.000 rounds with over 100 but yeah so it goes up throughout the year because then friends are also 17:17.000 --> 17:27.400 joining and yeah this is something that's very nice and then finishing do you mean like how many 17:27.400 --> 17:31.960 submit or how many projects in a state that their kids say they are finished 17:35.080 --> 17:45.160 okay so I met around 30 to 40 submit usually so we do have a last number there but we try to make this 17:47.720 --> 17:53.880 as accessible as possible with all the monthly calls and yeah the help that we offer 17:55.320 --> 18:01.480 but as I said kids tend to be perfectionist and they would love to have everything perfect 18:01.480 --> 18:06.760 before they hand something in and this is something that we are aware of but we support them as much 18:06.760 --> 18:13.320 as we can and we are always happy to also have unfinished projects because a project is 18:13.320 --> 18:17.560 honestly a project is never really finished you can always find something new you can always 18:18.360 --> 18:23.160 keep on breaking on a project I don't know how you feel about this but at least that's how I 18:23.160 --> 18:29.560 feel about a project I feel like just something that will never stop and I will always do some more so 18:31.560 --> 18:35.960 and does yeah so please share it with your friends share it with your colleagues share it with teachers you 18:36.040 --> 18:44.440 had or maybe teach us you know and yeah let them know that we are still for registration 18:46.360 --> 18:57.880 yes I'm sorry my name is not I'm very interesting the one that I have a question 18:58.840 --> 19:08.760 why the price is small and cash I have not educational things or experience why 19:09.800 --> 19:16.840 what do you mean so the question is why is the money cash and like the cash prices I'm not an 19:16.840 --> 19:25.800 educational experience I think it would be quite hard to come up with an educational experience 19:25.880 --> 19:33.000 for this age difference so we have 14 year old ones some of them are so they need to be 14 19:33.000 --> 19:39.560 in October for our ceremony when we take them so some of them are even just 13 so in this is the 19:39.560 --> 19:47.720 difference to a person who is 18 then joining yeah I would not know of an educational program 19:47.720 --> 19:52.680 that would cover the whole range of them and also I think it's something that motivates the kids 19:52.680 --> 20:00.600 to be honest because this is quite a lot of money for them and yeah it's something that they really 20:00.600 --> 20:10.920 look forward to and really want to get so yes do you have the participants who wants to 20:10.920 --> 20:18.840 team up with each other or wants to work together yes we so the question is do we have teams yes we 20:18.840 --> 20:26.840 do have teams we are also happy if teams join we will only invite one of the team people of the 20:26.840 --> 20:34.200 team members to join us for their words ceremony and Brussels so even if they attend people because 20:34.200 --> 20:41.080 then they get all of the friends in there and we encourage them to do that we cannot provide help 20:41.080 --> 20:46.120 on team building processes so this is something they will need to do on their own and this is 20:46.120 --> 20:52.120 something where we know that this can also need some time and some help so if you know people 20:52.120 --> 20:57.960 that would love to join us a team please make them aware of that team building and team processes 20:57.960 --> 21:05.000 are also a very important part of this yeah there was a question here same question about the 21:05.160 --> 21:11.160 teams okay yeah 21:18.440 --> 21:26.280 Germany has a high rate of joining but there are also Spanish I don't know to be honest I don't 21:26.280 --> 21:32.600 know we reach out to a lot of schools and a lot of associations a teacher associations so there 21:32.680 --> 21:39.800 are a lot of Spanish and a lot of German joining us there but there are also people from the Ukraine 21:40.760 --> 21:48.280 so and there are also people from the UK or Portugal and so far we had nobody from Iceland as 21:48.280 --> 21:56.760 as far as I can remember I would love to have that one day but yeah so I am not quite sure why 21:56.840 --> 22:06.040 that's the case and France is also very high in the ranking yeah so but all other countries I will 22:06.040 --> 22:13.560 say there are then there are single or like a few people so like some people from one area we also 22:13.560 --> 22:22.680 had one from Tupan so yeah Cyprus that's called an English so there are a lot of variety 22:23.240 --> 22:31.720 and the people joining us there yeah yes I think this is probably around the last 22:31.720 --> 22:49.480 question oh do we have this person there also had I think they could do that and they did 22:49.480 --> 22:55.240 support each other so like for example a person from the Netherlands who joined us for a lot of 22:55.240 --> 23:04.280 France and who also won in the last edition he did translations for somebody else so they do that 23:04.280 --> 23:09.080 and they can organize themselves in the matrix room and they get to know each other in a breakout 23:09.080 --> 23:15.560 room so they do make friends but that also something of the language barrier I would say that 23:15.560 --> 23:20.280 they building a team has not happened yet I would love to see that I think that would be really 23:20.280 --> 23:25.640 impressive especially as they have such a different background then and they bring so many 23:25.640 --> 23:30.440 so much knowledge than to the project so I think that might be a really really nice thing 23:30.440 --> 23:36.600 if this would happen sadly so far this has not been the case that there has been a cross country team 23:38.200 --> 23:44.040 but it is possible there are no there are no other eligibility criteria then that the 23:44.040 --> 23:50.680 teenagers need to be between 14 and 18 years that's the only thing but they can happen teams they 23:50.680 --> 23:57.080 can comment on their own yeah but did you take this into account so like a team project is 23:57.080 --> 24:03.400 evaluated differently then a single project so it's by the surety they do take this in account and 24:03.400 --> 24:09.320 we know down how many team members are working on this project yeah because of course a team can 24:09.880 --> 24:15.560 build a whole other project then a single individual can yeah but that's why we have this 24:15.560 --> 24:23.320 theory why we have those interviews and we try to make this as as life orientated for these 24:23.320 --> 24:28.200 students as possible so this is something that we really want to have we want to support those kids 24:28.200 --> 24:33.880 we want them to get to know about free stuff it to realize their own project idea and to 24:33.880 --> 24:41.800 yeah come up with this idea yes just a short question oh perhaps not we have the open source software 24:41.800 --> 24:50.680 but do you have teams or participants who want to rebuild and work on content also that they might 24:50.680 --> 24:57.720 have the issues with copyright so that you so my question is do you have situations where you 24:57.720 --> 25:05.960 help the participants with finding content that doesn't go against copyright if they agree 25:05.960 --> 25:11.960 are you mean like with large large language models no if they're going to remix an art if 25:11.960 --> 25:18.440 they're going to remix music okay so the question the question is if we do have a finding content 25:18.440 --> 25:25.560 that is under copyright and that's and find an alternative that's in the public domain or 25:25.560 --> 25:36.280 under CCC I would say if somebody approaches us with a question like that we might be able to 25:36.280 --> 25:41.480 have a life in questions but this is something that I would advise them to reach out to their 25:41.480 --> 25:48.520 teacher to be honest because this is not our expertise and if I would so doing this for 25:49.480 --> 25:58.360 90 programs are project then this would be quite busy yeah I'm not quite sure if this is 25:58.360 --> 26:06.600 something that's within our domain yeah okay times up I really be grateful for all the questions 26:06.600 --> 26:12.040 thank you so much thank you for having me and it was a pleasure of letting you know what you 26:12.040 --> 26:17.880 thanking for freedom I hope you share this with your colleagues and friends and kids in the age 26:18.600 --> 26:24.680 and yeah I'm happy to see many more faces there and yeah many more pre-suffered projects 26:24.680 --> 26:28.520 Thank you