Bonjour. It's a great honor to be present among you. I'm sorry, I speak English like an average
French. And I asked, obviously, I asked chat GPT and Google Translate to write me my speech,
so if it doesn't work for you, it's the algorithm fault, obviously. My name is Alexis
Kaufman and I'm going to present to you a forge project for all teachers and students in France.
So a forge project that foes them, so what? Nothing less original. But three points in
which, in my opinion, distinguish this forge from other classical forges. Users are teachers and
K-12 students, so up to 18 years old for school, not for the university. Share content is educational,
pedagogical content and is more text in a mock-up language than code. And last but not least,
the project is supported by the French state. A few words about me. Basically, I've been a high
school math teacher for 25 years, but also a kind of free software activist having founded
Fremontoft 20 years ago, a non-profit organization mainly focused on free software valorization.
And for years, we hoped, we, Fremontoft, we hoped for a real free software policy in
French education and elsewhere and worldwide, obviously. But that did not real come. I remember
10 years ago, as a president of Fremontoft, I wrote an article titled, My Ministry Drives Me
to Despair, where I said this, either my ministry doesn't know that free software exists and then
it is irresponsible and incompetent, or it knows it and does nothing and then it is guilty. By having
such remarks publicly, you can well imagine that I would never have thought of funding myself
one day in the ministry. But today times have changed. I was invited to join the ministry a year
ago and I accepted the challenge. This is the first time that there is such a free software and
open educational resources project manager in the institution and quite high in the organization
chart. And I think it's a good sign. Another good sign, we don't just use free software,
we also contribute. For example, we found a development for the open source video conferencing
to Big Blue Button and it's unusual to read this in a project repose. And we contribute to other
free software projects like NextCloud, Future, or Moodle. So another positive move, this project,
it responds to two needs expressed by the teachers. The first is a classic one. We are nearly a
million teachers in France and among them there are those who develop free software
application for education and some of which have a great potential. But all these projects are
scattered and it is difficult to spot them and then it's difficult to support them. And for ethical
and GDPR reasons, we cannot also tell our teachers to go to Microsoft GitHub. So let's bring them
together in a sovereign and secure space. And as we have computers courses from high school now
in France, this also concerns students. First need, the second need corresponds to new users.
Here we share a lot more formatted text, markdown, latech, then code to create educational content
together. And here we create content in the dark mode image which will then be pushed into web
pages, print PDF, or Jupyter Notebook. By using the pages function of the force, you can work
collaboratively on the force to produce web pages, web sites with quality educational content as in
this project with computer science teachers. And you can do this without leaving the web
environment, without knowing Gitpush, et cetera. Another example in continuous, CI,
continuous integration, we can also push markdown text into a pretty mind map as a
philosophy teacher suggests here, just to emphasize that it's not just science teacher who work this
way. So two needs expressed by teachers for a force of code and text. So let's do it. And the
force already exists as a, as a POC, as a proof of concept since last September with 200 projects,
300 accounts. It's a GitLab instance powered by a French P platform as a service, Claver Cloud,
who have a stand here at FOSDEM. And administered by the Association of Teachers Association,
the Association of Computer Science Teacher of France, the A-E-E-F. The big news just from
10 days ago is that the project has been validated by the ministry, which has integrated it into
its big strategy, the digital strategy for education 2023-2027. So the prototype force will
join the IT services of the ministry. I cannot give you more details because the project is just
beginning, so no roadmap, et cetera. But we have at least five years to move forward. To move
forward and convince of its interest more and more teachers and students. This is the big challenge.
Succeed in enlarging the cycle of users. This will require support, training,
animation, and promotion of the projects submitted. Here you can see a quick and dirty
swap analysis. The most important thing for me is that the project is supported by the
institution and that it has values close to an event like the FOSDEM. So I have just one minute.
Okay. So I don't detail the strengths, opportunities, or weaknesses. So thank you. I came to FOSDEM
to present this project, but also despite my terrible level of English to discuss and see if
other countries, other ministry of education in Europe, for instance, are engaged in similar
projects to pool and share our experiences. Okay. Don't hesitate to talk about it around you if you
think the project is interesting. And thank you very much for your attention.
Thanks for your attention. If there is anyone who has a question,
is there anyone who has a question in French, in English, also in chat GPT language?
No, but if we have them, I can read with you a first list of positive points and some risks.
So obviously the main thing is that it's an institutional project that carries values,
openness, sharing ethics, sovereignty. So sovereignty is important here and sustainability. It
encourages teachers and students to work together and so increase digital and computer skills,
I think. And by gathering our force, join the force in the same place, it's easier to make
community and obtain means. It's easier to ask money. And doing so, I hope we will have a big,
a large bank of open educational content with free license and available to the entire school
community. There is also a point with what in France we call it sobriété numérique,
digital sobriété. I think it's not a good translation, but because we use light and open
format, we can work offline. It's improved the existing rather than beginning from scratch,
et cetera, et cetera. And important with the project for us is comments. So its governance
and policy is shared with the users. That's very important because we did a lot of projects,
a lot of top-down projects in the French Ministry of Education. These want to be more horizontal.
Not very expensive, but at the beginning, but if there are more and more users with CICD,
it can be different. And the threats, maybe it's a too complex tool for teachers and students
if you want more and more users. So great needs for documentation, training, community
animation. And convicts, great teachers who are already on forges to migrate to our force.
That's a point because super teachers are already on Github, for instance.
A couple of stuff. This is not clear. If the content belongs to the agents or the teacher
or to the states, there is a thing to... And the evolution of GitLab offer and the competition
with Microsoft Github, with Copilot, and cetera with more and more new functions. Voila.
Thank you.