About

Welcome to Guri! Guri was the result of an interaction between a group of high school students from Northern Italy and members of the association Hipatia, which acts in the world to promote freedom of knowledge for a better community. At the beginnings we started working with various kinds of free software and, working day by day, we became aware of the importance of a different approach to knowledge in all its shapes. The power of free software and the concepts which it is based on, made in us grow a new sensitivity.

From that time we understood that, if knowledge would be free, then all society would be different too.

In our context there is a big lack in education: everyone is educated from the early school to think just for himself and all the educational system works to develop a society of the single which separates people to increase the interest of few others. For this reason we set up a working group in order to make things change: in our opinion to change a community you must start from education. In fact we are a project which works in schools: we are all students and from the inside we are acting to fill this gap in people's way to live. From the 2007 we are working in Italy to create and increase in people awareness: we started teaching to classes in schools making students enter in contact with our themes. Our main work is a series of lessons and workshops with people in ITIS, a high school of 3000 students, about the use of free means of communication. Our HQ was a lab inside the school with internet access and Gnu/Linux systems. Everyday was a new experiment with different people working with us and different themes to discuss (from p2p, licenses, laws on technology, to new software). The interesting thing of these educational experiments was that, in order not to indoctrinate students, we tried many ways of teaching to stimulate their critical thinking. When dealing with education there are many important things we learned to take into account. The most important thing is that we want to make people think. In a typical lesson we introduce an issue and then we discuss it and give people the possibility to search and make their own ideas. Then everyone has to make a own work of growth. Every step that someone reaches is thanks to his or her will to know. The process of growth is double sided. There isn't a teaching élite and a target. When we spread knowledge we learn too in a completely horizontal way.

For these reasons we cooperated with Richard Matthew Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, organizing a series of conferences in schools (from Savona to Biella) dealing with technological freedom and education, introducing real examples of the free software world.

You can find more information about our core work or read the first and second Hipatia manifesto. If you want to contact us use the apposite form. Here you can find the actual   Guri members.