My history with the Internet Health officially started in 2014, the same year when I started teaching, in this year, I met the Mozilla community in Brazil. Some months later, I began to do volunteer work helping with translation, support, and community engagement. My first activity as a volunteer was to contribute to organizing the WebMaker party in my region (pt-br), back in the days when Mozilla was launching the WebMaker app. I still remember the joys of the kids who are participating in the first time they started to learn more about how websites are made and how they can build their websites, it was amazing!
After this first activity, I understood that teaching is what I love to do! In the past five years, I did almost one talk every month (also I’m a full-time professor at Fatec Taquaritinga, teaching in Computer Science field) trying to spread the word about openness, web development, Mozilla’s mission, and why is so important to keep the web open! I delivered talks about WebXR, IoT, Web development, Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Source, Git, Mozilla’s mission, Privacy, Internet Health, and other topics.
During my classes I always try to bring those topics to the students, I do my best to motivate them to contribute to open projects, and to help others to do the same, I believe we need to work hard with this new generation preparing everyone for the future of the internet, to keep fighting for privacy, for openness and to keep avoiding closed gardens. After all, they are the next generation of web developers, content producers, consumers, legislators, lawyers, politicians, etc.
For the next ten years, I will keep working hard with the students to bring more openness to their daily lives; I believe we need more replicators learning and teaching about how important is the Internet Health, if we want to keep fighting we need to maintain the cycle, when people leave the activities for any reason new volunteers are joining to keep the movement alive!
