I had an extremely lackluster public school education. Between nervous science presentations, a lack of resources, a plethora of heckling cool kids and 13 years of humorless math teachers, I certainly managed to fly under the radar. Writing and Lit were the only 2 subjects where I wasn’t average in every way. I can’t help thinking I might’ve been a different person if my school had had internet access.

My friend Jess Hemerly from the Institute for the Future just sent me the link to Digital Open - a community and competition for youth to engage in free and open technology projects. The IFTF, BoingBoing and Sun Microsystems launched Digital Open to encourage young adults and kids under 17 to create openly licensed projects related to software, activism, science, environmentalism, ethical entrepreneurship, tinkering/invention, art and gaming. In dedication to the free culture movement, the project accepts all licenses approved by freedomdefined.org as well as Affero GPL v.2 (AGPLv2) and CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.

I’m already blown away by the first entry. Brennon Williams is a 14-year-old who created a science magazine in 5th grade and a well read science blog - bwsciencelabs.com in 7th grade. Editors at Make Magazine write, “If Brennon is our future, I think we’re going to be okay.” Williams is certainly better equipped to change the world than the punks they churned out from my school (myself included). Below is a video of Williams addressing a school assembly entitled, “From Passion to Action”: