With its roots in the computer club of Katharineum zu Lübeck and the project coordination by Teckids e.V., AlekSIS has been designed as a free software project from the ground up. This fact is very important to all developers, because especially education has to rely on tools developed collaboratively and needs to be independent of a company’s commercial success.
Despite of the importance of the ideology, a viable software product needs to be financed. In addition to fair wages for the team, money is needed for infrastructure or the representation at conferences.
On many levels of public administrations, there is a shift in favour of Open Source systems. Initiatives like Public Money, Public Code by FSFE or regional groups like Do-FOSS demand that IT systems financed by the public must also benefit the public. Additionally, they point out that being independent from single, commercial manufacturers increases sustainability and IT resilience. On EU level, the Joinup project of the European Commission strengthens the interoperability of public administrations.
But in reality, initial funding for open, independent software is a major problem which prevents many good software from becoming usable for production. Investments in new software, which is not in productive use, are mostly impossible due to lack financing. In this case, partially private, partially public initiatives help by funding Open Source projects.
One of these intiatives is the NGI0 Entrust fund financed by the NLnet foundation through money from the European Commission. It’s main objective is to foster trustworthiness and sovereignty on the internet.
After the application for a funding amount of 50000 € in September, the AlekSIS project today got the official confirmation to be one of 55 projects which were accepted in the current funding round (the exact amount of funding will be set in the next weeks by a project plan).
The funding should make it possible for the AlekSIS project to implement important features for use in more different schools and school types. For this goal, the following topics have been identified, among other things:
In addition to that, the team would like to organise another presentation at the education fare didacta in Cologne.
