Not to sure if I can post about this here, but let’s see. Back at the FSF 40 event, we had an approach from Carmen, a free software avocate from New Zealand asking for support for her project to help young people aged 11-14 get in to free software.
I have been in touch with her for the past few months, and it seems take up hasn’t been as good as she was expecting,
I just thought I would reach out here and ask if there are members here who know anyone 11-14 who may be interested.
It would be good to get future generations passionate about free and open source generally and hopefully they can be the contributors of the future.
I think the plan was to run online groups, with meetings via Jitsi Meet, but I am not sure how that would work in practice, perhaps it would be more practical in some cases to work with Linux user groups and see how they can help, and Carmen can get some help driving this forward in a way that serves the needs of that age group.
My main involvement is that I am trying to help in what ever way I can.
The best strategy would be to get involved with school districts. @Gidget and/or @VioletLain may be able to provide some advice for your current predicament.
I can provide you with an actionable draft plan:
Use the main Jitsi Meet instance (https://meet.jit.si/), which requires someone to authenticate against Google Firebase using a Facebook or Google account on behalf of other participants.
Schedule online meetings at consistent, regular intervals (weekly or monthly) based on the most common timezone shared among the current active participants.
While this may feasibly work and is scalable, note that others’ threat models and workflows may differ, so broad adoption may be a social challenge.
Thanks for this, I think Carmen has switched over to Galene for the meetings and said she has a few people interested so fingers crossed the group can grow from there.
She is self hosting a lot of this too.
I just hope it all takes off, and yes having a regular scheduled event is important, as people can plan ahead adnadd it to their diaries.