42 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
title: voty.ch - Bringing Democracy to Schools
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---
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pub_date: 2020-11-25
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---
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author: voty.ch & ungleich
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---
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_hidden: no
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---
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_discoverable: no
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---
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body:
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## voty.ch - Bringing Democracy to Schools
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Democracy is one of Switzerland's most valuable assets. And it's not something we can just take for granted, that's what we realize during this special year 2020. But how can we motivate our younger generation to care about it?
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The project voty.ch tries to increase the understanding of democracy for children aged 12-18 years with three modules:
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**Understand Democracy:** How does democracy actually work in Switzerland and why is it indispensable? voty.ch would like to motivate our youth to understand and discuss the building blocks of our political system using existing and newly created learning material.
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**Test Democracy:** Only adults may cast a vote. But young people have an opinion, too! voty.ch started to organize test votings for school classes during national ballots. What does our youth think about the upcoming ballots?
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**Experience Democracy:** Who decides at school? Are students invited to propose initiatives and discuss them? voty.ch would like to experiment with bringing democratical decision processes to schools in Switzerland.
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The project is developed in [open-source](http://github.com/teachen-ch/voty/) as part of the [prototypefund.opendata.ch](https://prototypefund.opendata.ch), a fund to bring forward civic tech in Switzerland. When it came to hosting, it became quickly clear, that storing student data with political opinions at AWS or Google is a complete no-go. So the team decided to go for a Swiss ISP and didn't hestate long before opting for a sustainable solution with 100% renewable energy at ungleich.ch.
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## ungleich's take on voty.ch
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From the very beginning at ungleich, our goal has been fostering sustainability in technology. That is why we run a Zero Carbon data center, which only uses the local hydropower plant as a source of electricity. And that is why we reuse existing buildings and recycled hardware to reduce carbon emissions as much as possible.
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We strive for a digital sustainability in every way we can: all our services are IPv6 first, many of our services even run IPv6 only. All our tools are fully Open Source, and we open our infrastructure and monitoring data for free. With our hosted Matrix chat and the IPv6VPN.ch we have been supporting free speech and allowing unhindered communication in situations where it would not be possible otherwise. Our way of pursuing sustainability has attracted like-minded people as our customers, especially those who are passionate about the responsibility of technology towards sustainability.
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Given all that, we must admit that our team became very excited when we learned about the project voty.ch. A platform that helps students to experience democratic processes first hand, we find it as a true enabler. Democratic processes, discourses and finding consensus is deeply rooted in Switzerland and we can not stress its importance enough.
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voty.ch, as seen by ungleich, is not only a Swiss project to foster its own democracy, but it is also an inspiration to the rest of the world where sound democracy is needed for our future generation. The beauty of voty.ch is that it is Open Source – everyone can use and adapt it to their needs. Translate it into your own language. Or even host it yourself.
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We are very happy to welcome voty.ch to our infrastructure. We look
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forward to seeing students practicing democracy on
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[voty.ch](https://voty.ch).
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