Our Core Work

---

Guri is a project born inside a High School in Italy, as an answer to the growing practice of treating abstract concepts of knowledge as tangible objects. In fact the mainstream cultural framework in Italy is locked by dangers and threats to our freedom such as patents,
copyright laws and attempts to make the knowledge become a property of someone. These threats are locking down education in Italy and everyday prevent the exercise of some of the most important human rights.Education in most of the schools is meant in a pyramidal way, creating a strong dependence between the educators and the educated people. Also in the filed of IT-enabled education we are facing a similar conception of knowledge. This is caused by the adoption of proprietary, subjugating software inside schools.

In the proprietary software model people are completely divided from the developers who provide the software, and are only treated as"end users". This creates a big lack in knowledge not allowing people to understand and control the software they are using and thus preventing access to knowledge, by putting locks such as NDA, patents, absurd copyright laws and EULAs.

This makes people weak and dependent, by being not able to adapt the software they are using for their needs, imposing restrictions to the users and by not distributing the source code, essential to understand how a software works.

The software libre is the natural and fundamental tool to give back freedom to the people, by giving them the power to control, study, adapt and share the software they are using.

Our practical goals are to convert the whole educational system and base it exclusively on free software, extending the freedoms it grants back to every field of knowledge. In fact we believe in the power of education and we think that by changing the way the future citizens will learn and cooperate we can achieve together a better society, made by informed and aware people.

For these reasons we are advocating and working for a completely horizontal way of sharing knowledge as a fundamental good for humanity, in which everyone can participate in the shaping of knowledge and improve it, for a better society. This is possible thanks to the free software commitment to the community, which grants to everyone the freedom to share.

Our aims are:

• to focus our efforts on the creation of a network of people sharing together ideas and projects
• participate in the development of an educational environment which can be actively shaped by students
• endorsing the creation of communities cooperating with free software that keep the money and efforts on the territory, in opposition to a centralized knowledge system.

To achieve them we are taking actions to promote and endorse the raise of many NGO and groups of people all over the world, helping them communicate and be free from censorship. The main actions are:

• providing web hosting to NGO and people who shares our goals;
• releasing all our articles and material in a free editable wiki;
• the realization of conferences and event about software libre, in cooperation with many other partners in the world;
• provide material for education, focusing on videos;
• organizing lessons inside schools made exclusively by students, in order to help students to cooperate and share knowledge;
• working with social co-operatives to help them become free software enabled.