Who we are and where we come from

We are a student group at the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg aiming to promote political activism. Currently we are mostly active at the faculty of computer science.

The student body of this faculty has been traditionally "apolitical", manifesting especially in the positioning of its student council. With one of the first waves of protests against article 13 (the now passed EU copyright directive) our dismay at this non-positioning by the student council reached its peak and we decided to form a student group to work on political topics at our faculty.

In a first meeting around October 2018 we collected topics our members are interested in. This should give us a guideline where to get active. We then decided to enable political activism on a broad spectrum, though it was also perfectly clear to us that we were generally left leaning.

In the coming months we mostly discussed different aspects on how to form the group etc. In addition we also started planning our first event. Around this time we also experimented with advertising different demonstrations to the students at our faculty, for example the big demonstration in Magdeburg against the IMK (conference of ministers for interior).

Around March 2019 we had officially gained the status of a student group and written our first (and still current) mission statement:

Our goal is to activate students left-politically. Our focus lies in the encouraging, promoting and enabling of activities with the goal to change the current socio-political conditions towards a sustainable protection of human and nature through the fighting of unjust power concentrations and suppression.

In addition our first event, a talk on free social networks moved closer, supposed to take in April.

After the talk, which was reasonably well visited and got a few people interested on networks like mastodon, we turned towards smaller tasks. We organized a travel to an counter-protest in Erfurt, started joining different activist groups in town (like the local FfF-group) and a workshop on online fascism ("fighting fascism online").

Over the summer of 2019 we've gotten a bit less active as a group, since most of us were involved in other groups, but with the starting of the semester we're planning to get active again, starting with a workshop on personal security in the digital realm, held by the DigitalCourage student group from Bielefeld.

Further activities are planned and we'll keep you updated on here.

So in summary we're a group of students who want to establish a culture of politically active students on campus. For this we support activism among our students, as long as we can stand behind it and it falls in our mission statement. We also heavily encourage the forming of student groups for different topics, like for example the Students for Future group.

If you want to join us or ask for our support, feel free to contact us at contact@politfoo.org

We'll leave you with a picture of our current (not 100% official) logo: