Continuation: TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR ONLINE GATHERINGS
The educational TEAM-space that has been acquired, enables our parent university ArtEZ to hold Microsoft accountable, as their mutual agreement falls under European Law and should be in accordance to the strictest privacy regulations. Students and tutors are of course entirely free to make use of other online tools for their meetings, but we urge you to keep in mind that alternative, perhaps less corporate, less neo-liberal, less monopolizing services, are not necessarily also safer (one should never have a privacy policy that could fit one piece of paper with sentences like "we store as little data and logs as possible.") As an educational organization under EU law, we are not allowed to use such services for storage of documents (including student files and theses). That said: DAI's own website finds itself at an external server: a hard-fought exit from the centralized, rather top down and most often not very DAI-compatible services of ArtEZ. For the post Covid-19 future it will indeed be interesting, as our students are suggesting, to consider extending our "independent" online capacities - if budget permits. To claim our say over the distribution of the means of production is an ongoing struggle: we are charged, nearly 30 % of our revenues on an annual base, for the totality of the services that ArtEZ provides to its courses, including institutional supervision. Wether we make use of a service or not, wether we agree with the nature and quality of a service or not. All this with the unique exception of "housing", another hard-fought achievement: since 2017, when DAI said farewell to bricks and walls and became a Roaming Academy we have only been charged a very small sum for the buildings owned and maintained by ArtEZ (money that we use to facilitate our gatherings at alternative locations). Coming back to Teams: for the time being, in the middle of the crisis, we are happy to be able to offer support to students and tutors by means of what is already available in a relatively easy, accessable and privacy wise, quite safe way.