Youth Hacking 4 Freedom

[Harald Welte]

Hi Daniele,

On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:35:56PM +0200, Daniele "Mte90" Scasciafratte wrote:
> As I know in the Italian case at that age is difficult that you know how to develop in something a bit more complex about what they teach at school and also they have no idea what is Git.

I started development at the age of 10, by 14 I had learned Pascal + x86
assembly programming and was releasing some shareware [because I did not
yet know about FOSS!], at 16 Perl and C and contributing to FOSS.

And this was ages ago, i.e.  long before IT was as big as it is today.
Yes, this is not the "norm", but I definitely know a lot of talented
folks (in and out of FOSS) who also started very early in their youth to
do development.

I really think there is quite some potential to try to get those people
involved with FOSS early.  Being a talented / young developer doesn't
mean that you automatically get sufficiently exposed to FOSS as a
underlying methodology and ideology.

If your approach is to rely on the knowledge that school is teaching
students [and think people would need to learn more after the basics
were taught in school], then that is just following a normal school +
university curriculum.  There are plenty of those out there.

What is missing, IMHO, is some kind of better support structure for
those who start at a much younger age, unrelated to any school
curriculum or the like.  If they don't happen to meet a mentor or be the
kind of autodidactic person that always teaches themselves everything
from books, it can be hard.

YH4F is more about a contest / award than about mentoring from what I
can tell, but nevertheless I think YH4F is an interesting project.  I'm
definitely looking forward to see what kind of submissions we'll
receive.  I'd imagine the extra cash definitely comes in handy for the
usual teenager budget to buy more hardware for hacking, books, etc.

Regards,
	Harald

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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