The Guiding Principle (The Soul of the Foundation)
- Collective Self-Learning and Empowerment through Networks: The foundation's core purpose is to encourage decentralized self-learning, bringing learning, teaching and research participants and their journeys onto common ground through practical experience and feedback. We believe in a living ecosystem that grows from its own creations, where the network evolves through the community's attempts, collaborations, experiments and dialogue. Technology and science serve human autonomy.
The protocols that guide teaching, research and publication, their validation criteria and the evidence needed to understand their results are public, versioned and open to community contributions. Different tools can put them into practice without any provider holding exclusive authority over the method. Every essential process has at least one usable and verifiable path that does not depend on additional commercial modules.
The foundation's own contribution is the public experience that brings together learning, research and collaboration. To provide it, .org may use open or proprietary technologies purchased, provided or licensed by their suppliers under the applicable usage rights. Using these tools neither transfers their ownership to the foundation nor determines the rights to work created by participants.
How the Community Connects (Areas of Activity)
To serve the diverse people seeking freedom of knowledge, the foundation welcomes different journeys without imposing bureaucratic constraints:
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For Academic Students (Science and Practice Together):
- The Journey: Students learn alongside the scientific state of the art. Starting with real examples and showcase code aligned with rigorous protocols, they gain the ability to develop a software product while writing and structuring their scientific work, bringing code and theory together in one coherent journey that begins in the classroom.
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For Enthusiasts and Self-Taught Learners (The Freedom to Create):
- The Journey: An open space for people who seek knowledge for the sheer pleasure of building. Without being required to follow the formal rigor of academia, enthusiasts have access to free, modular code to learn at their own pace, explore tools and experiment freely.
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For Teachers and Educators (Equal Opportunities):
- The Journey: Educators are not merely consumers of ready-made content, but co-creators. Teachers find open methodologies and lesson plans maintained collaboratively by the community, allowing any institution, from a small school to an advanced center, to access excellent teaching tools and expanding equal access to high-quality science in a decentralized way.
The First Demonstrable Cycle (The Pilot)
To begin, we propose bringing together a class, an open project, a public review protocol and a reproducible artifact. The class experiments with and documents the project; contributions and results undergo explicit criteria and human review. The artifact must include the instructions, versions and shareable materials others need to examine the process and repeat what is possible, without depending on private access to verify the method.
At the end of the cycle, we will publish the objectives, evidence, limitations encountered and what needs to change before expanding the initiative. The pilot does not aim to prove the entire vision at once, but to make the meeting of teaching, engineering and research verifiable.
Network Sustainability (Community Value)
The greatest asset of itfree.org lies in shared protocols and the strength of mutual collaboration:
- Methodological standards are developed with the community and can be implemented by different tools and adapters. Artifacts published as open can evolve through community contributions while preserving the terms of their licenses.
- Each project identifies the licenses applicable to its code, content and shareable data, including contribution and commercial use terms. Opening a protocol does not change the rights to the tools that implement it or authorize the disclosure of protected data.
- Code and protocols made available for free use receive explicit licenses allowing their use and continuation by the community, even when a provider stops offering the tool that ran them. Access rights to generated data and its portability follow each project's authorship, licensing and privacy limits.
- Knowledge flows freely: what is taught at the foundation becomes code in the lab, which in turn generates data for open science, fuels discussion in the network and feeds back into the learning cycle for future generations.