WHY2025

Digital sovereignty and the FOSS-stack at school.
2025-08-11 , Andromeda
Language: English

The need for digital sovereignty has always been great, but now there is an autocrat in the White house that is fighting everything he deems “Woke”. This renders USA Big Tech that is run by billionaires that have sworn loyalty to this new King unsuitable for use in education. In this presentation we'll present the WHY for the FOSS stack for schools, our plan how to get there, and the progress we have made so far on our pilot schools.


The need for digital sovereignty has always been great, but now there is an autocrat in the White house that is fighting everything he deems “Woke”. This renders USA Big Tech that is run by billionaires that have sworn loyalty to this new King unsuitable for use in education. Schools are yearning for a more fair digital environment, but most schools don’t have the funding, knowledge or capacity to create a public-values-by-design school IT environment with all the fantastic free and open source software that is out there. That is why we started the coalition for fair digital education, so we can bring together the knowledge of free and opensource with the needs of the educational sector. In this presentation we'll present the WHY for the FOSS stack for schools, our plan how to get there, and the progress we have made so far on our pilot schools.

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