Promote Digital Maturity by reading books to others

In July this year I participated at Digitalcourage's "Aktivcongress", a yearly meeting for activists in Germany. Digitalcourage has been campaigning for a world worth living in the digital age since 1987. I participated in sessions about Free Software, had a lightning talk about the "I love Free Software day", and I did two readings of the book "Ada & Zangemann - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream" to inspire participants from other organisations how they could use the book to better accomplish their goals.

The feedback about the book was great, especially the fact that all the materials to read aloud yourself, presentation slides with the illustrations, and the texts with markers to change slides are available in our git repository (thanks to the many contributors who made it possible that the book is meanwhile available in Arabic, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Ukrainian, and Valencian, and there are more translation efforts going on).

Furthermore I had many interesting conversations with Jessica Wawrzyniak and Leena Simon, who wrote books about digital topics in German-- so we thought we team up and raise awareness about the books, and the ways how you can use them to foster digital rights.

• Jessica Wawrzyniak's book is the children's and young people's encyclopedia "#Kids #digital #genial - Protect yourself and your data!" (in German), which in more than 150 short entries explain terms from the media world and opens up political, economic and social contexts, and her book "Screen Teens - How we accompany young people into digital responsibility" (in German)

• Leena Simon's "Digital Literacy - How we save the world with a new attitude" (in German) in which she shows ways in which people can self-determined work for freedom and democracy in a digital world.

One occasion to make use of those books is now Friday, 17 November, which is the nationwide Read Aloud Day in Germany, when everyone is encouraged to read to children in a kindergarten, school, library or other social institution. Together with Digitalcourage e.V. the FSFE support this nice tradition and we are promoting the reading of available books that highlight important aspects of digital rights on this day.

As Jessica Wawrzyniak, media educator at Digitalcourage wrote "Topics relating to digitization, media use and data protection are not yet sufficiently addressed in daycare centers, schools and social institutions, but they can be addressed in a child-friendly way."

In recent months, I read the book to over 1000 children. It was always a great fulfilment to discuss the book with the participants, and see how they are afterwards motivated to tinker, be creative, while they still also think about topics like equality, inclusion, democracy and activism.

Children and young people should be encouraged to stand up for their basic rights, including the right to informational self-determination, and to shape the information technology world in a self-determined and responsible way -- which includes Free Software.

So we encourage you to grab one of those books, or others you enjoy which are suitable for reading to children and young adults, read it to others, and have discussions with them.

If you live in Germany, you can use the 17 November. But do not feel limited by that. Reading books to others and discussing topics, you feel are important for society, should not be limited to one day.