Free Software Goes to Polish Schools

The Polish FLOSS Foundation in a joint effort with school headmasters, supported by local authorities, organized a series of lectures on free software in education. The campaign took place in Polish high schools.

The entire thing started at the beginning of 2007, when a 15-year-old junior high student, Wojciech Ploszaj, from Malopolska, South Poland, came up with the idea of spreading free software in local schools. He even started organizing meetings in local primary and secondary schools, where he talked about the benefits of using Linux as the primary operating system, as well as free software as an alternative to proprietary apps.

The Foundation for Free and Open-Source Software (FWIOO) together with Jakilinux.org - after finding out about Wojciech's initiative - organized a wiki page where they explained the ideas of planned activities and encouraged young persons to join as speakers on similar events all over the country. More than 200 volunteers signed up in the first week, and the number kept increasing.

In June 2007, the activities were planned much better, organizing the community, trying to find sponsors, etc. The official logo was selected by public vote, while some banners were created randomly.

Rafal Brzychcy, from FWIOO, started convincing local business and authorities that the project is worth supporting. Tadeusz Dziuba, the state governor, was the first one who supported the action. Afterwards, sponsors started appearing, and the project was growing. Novell, Mandriva, Oracle and UX Systems - a local Open Office vendor - offered their products to be distributed for free in the selected schools. Free CDs were given away by the local Ubuntu community and LinuxEduCD (a Polish educational, Debian-based LiveCD project).

October 28th, 2007 was the date when the first event took place, in one of Poznan's high schools, followed by a couple of presentations that took place almost every week. After this, the project went into schools from five different voivodeships. The volunteers made their presentations in 30 schools in 14 cities.

The campaign is gaining interest in the media, which could bring some more funding to the project. The action is planned to extend in Hungary too, as local authorities have already asked for help in preparing something similar in schools.