Instant Messaging is the one means of communication children and adolescents use in their free-time, and gets more important in education while classmates (or even worse, teachers) create chatrooms for their classes on non-free, privacy-unaware services. Teckids e.V. is tackling this issue in Germany, and we want to share our experiences in doing so.

What makes children use IM? What do they want or need? What are the difficulties in switching to a free/open service? What tools did we try, and how do they fit in?

We also want to listen to other people's experiences, and share thoughts on what developers of tools might need to take into account in order to make existing tools ready for use by children and in education.