In the context of #FreeWebSearchDay, a couple of events took place online and in various places in the weeks following 29 September. Today let us look back at some highlights:

Daoud Clarke from search engine Mwmbl kicked off the #FreeWebSearchDay series on the very day of 29 September, offering an online curatathon, which mainly attracted young students and professionals.

Only few days later, The Open Search Foundation hosted a fun bubble sort activity for young kids as part of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Open Day on 3 October. The goal: To teach the youngest how a basic algorithm works.

A little bit older was our audience at Gymnasium Kempfenhausen. On  2 October – „Day of Democracy“ – Leopold Beer and Dr. Alexander Decker (both from OSF) gave an overview on „AI and democracy, chances and risks“, adressing roundabout 200 ninth and tenth graders. Their talk was rewarded with very vivid discussions. For anyone interested, there is a link list with interesting reading recommendations on the website of FreeWebSearchDay. Click here.

An exclusive study presentation happend at BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt in Munich, where consulting firm Mücke Roth & Company together with our OpenWebSearch.eu team, presented the study „Market potential of Open Web Search“, gathering attendees from economy, research and the public sector.

At University of Kassel, our PriDI project team invited to an afternoon with GDD (Gesellschaft für Datenschutz und Datensicherheit e. V.) to inform and discuss the topic of „Search engines as a danger for Privacy“, with a special focus on business and trade secrets.

An inspiring keynote on „Why we need transparent and free search engines“ was given by Christine Plote online, as part of the “gemeinsinn” event series organized by the creative agency elfgenpick. You can find a full video taping:

To keep FWSD alive and thriving, we continuously work on spreading awareness around the yearly action day. Make sure to sign up to our OSF newsletter to stay in the know of upcoming events and become involved in the Open Search Community.

By the way. If you want to lose no more time. This week, the yearly OpenSearchSymposium is in place. You can still join online.