Erin Rose Glass is a researcher and educator who encourages the use of ethical technology that puts user freedom and community values front and center. Glass believes that students should have the opportunity to learn with free software. Otherwise, they "leave the classroom having missed the opportunity to know and experience ethical forms of software practice, leaving them ill prepared to face our current technological political challenges," she states.

Glass will keynote LibrePlanet 2023, the fifteenth edition of the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) annual conference on ethical technology and user freedom. Regarding her talk, she says, "I am excited to share my research and practice with the free software community, and look forward to continued dialogue about how the values of user freedom can be more broadly shared and experienced." In her keynote, Glass will highlight a range of promising contemporary examples of experiments in higher education that push against exploitative trends in technology in education and familiarize students with software freedom. "As we chart the course of the future of software, these examples shine light on the importance of educational institutions in the struggle for software freedom and the urgent need for broader community support to help sustain and encourage these precarious endeavors," Glass says.

Miriam Bastian, program manager for the FSF, says the FSF is "delighted to host Erin as a keynote at LibrePlanet 2023. Having spread the importance of software freedom across universities, community colleges, and academic libraries, Glass has been charting the course in education for years. LibrePlanet visitors will be genuinely interested to hear of her experiences and we look forward to having Glass keynote as she fits so perfectly with this year's theme: 'Charting the Course'."

The FSF will announce further keynote speakers before the start of the conference, and the full LibrePlanet 2023 schedule is expected soon. Thousands of people have attended LibrePlanet over the years, both in person and remotely. The conference welcomes visitors from up to fifteen countries each year, with many more joining online. Hundreds of impressive free software speaker sessions, including keynote talks by Edward Snowden, Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle, 2022's artist collective Hundred Rabbits, and Waag founder Marleen Stikker, can be viewed on the conference's MediaGoblin instance in anticipation of further program announcements.

About LibrePlanet

LibrePlanet is the annual conference of the FSF. Over the last decade, LibrePlanet has blossomed from a small gathering of FSF associate members into a vibrant multi-day event that attracts a broad audience of people who are interested in the values of software freedom. LibrePlanet 2023 is the fifteenth edition and will be held on March 18 and 19, 2023 both online and in person in the Boston area. To receive announcements about LibrePlanet 2023, visit https://libreplanet.org/conference and sign up for the email updates.

Registration for LibrePlanet: "Charting the Course" is open. Attendance is free of charge to FSF associate members and students.

For information on how your company or organization can sponsor LibrePlanet or have a table in the lively and centrally located exhibit hall, see this year's sponsoring prospectus, or email campaigns@fsf.org.

About the Free Software Foundation

The FSF, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its websites, located at https://www.fsf.org and https://www.gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at https://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

MEDIA CONTACT

Miriam Bastian
Program Manager
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns@fsf.org

Image Copyright © 2022, Erin Rose Glass, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.