Back in 2003, with CreaLabs we started the e-Socrates project, creating the first Italian portal promoting the free e-learning philosophy, because we truly believe that knowledge must be free.

Some days ago Simone Brunozzi told me about an idea he was working on, a community made by students and teachers, together creating documentation that would be grouped in books, maybe printed, obviously released under a free license. Hey this is just a small resume about his idea, please visit his blog for further information!

This evening, driving back home after work, I was thinking about Italian high schools, let’s talk with some numbers (examples):

• every 2 years every student has to buy 10 books, 40 Euro every book
• 40 * 10 / 2 = 200 Euro/year
• let’s think about 2 million of Italian students (actually there are many more, but let’s take some margins)
• 200 * 2,000,000 = 400,000,000 Euro/year

Let’s imagine what my country could do with only half of this amount every year… with 200,000,000 Euro/year Italy could pay a huge team of teachers that would create all the books for the next year. All this books should be released under a free license and freely available for everyone to download. Many low cost print services could be used for who students that want a paper copy of the books (I think that a paper copy could be given to any student for free).

Amouts are higher than what I wrote because in Italy there are more that 2,000,000 high school students… what a better world could be…

Maybe I’m not the first having his idea, it seems so obvious…