[Ghm-discuss] Hackers educational system

[Ilya Vasilyev]

Hello, GNU Hackers Meeting.

I will be happy to present on GHM in Paris the original hackers educational 
system, called Civil Hackers' School, that I opened in Moscow at December 1996 
by request of two teenagers, who asked me to teach them computer hacking.

As for now, I need a sponsor for travelling to Paris and making visa.  I will 
contact some people locally.  May be, I can find someone later in August, 
during my visit to California.  But the best is if people from France or FSF 
itself volunteer to sponsor my visit and continue to invest into hackers 
education for Paris citizens after I return to Moscow.

I made presentation of Civil Hackers' School at hackers gathering SPRYG-2k in 
Moscow, Russia at May 2000.  At Chaos Communication Camp in Germany at August 
2007.  At the closed computer security convention in Las Vegas at August 2008.  
As a public event in NoiseBridge, San Francisco at August 2009.  2013 could be 
a good time for France.

The basic idea is to support groups of citizens in different cities and 
countries, who have interest in computers.  Hackers and wannabes will 
physically hang together to study and experiment with computers, showing their 
progress on public Attestations.  This is the same educational framework, as 
one can see in existing martial art schools: aikido, karate-do, wushu, 
Taekwondo, etc.  Some students proved to keep focus on computer security, while 
others enjoy creativity and sharing.  The most successful share knowledge with 
younger and later consider teacher position themselves.

Technical skills are developed at the same time, as student study hacker 
ethics, free software philosophy, history of computer hacking, etc.  From 1997 
to 2010 I taught students within Russian government educational system (Moscow 
City Pioneer Palace) -- not only using GNU and free software tools (Free 
Pascal, GCC, GIMP, etc.), but showing to teenagers that technical superiority 
of those tools came from correct ethical choice of their programmers.  Since 
2010 I dive deeper into ancient Zen educational system, not widely known on the 
West, and mostly concentrate on private education.

This is just an overview, let me save details for the Meeting itself.

-- -- --
Ilya V. Vasilyev, +7 916 258-0286
Civil Hackers' School
Moscow, Russia