Welcome to PUBLIC

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The Public Universal Base: Libre Infrastructure Community (PUBLIC) forms a flexible EU Consortium to promote adoption of free software in Europe to build a lasting public digital infrastructure.

Flexible means that specific members of the community will apply as “PUBLIC” for various tenders and public funding issued by the European Commission so as to retain the general objectives of the community while addressing specific calls, demonstrating cooperation and capacity to adapt to various contexts.

PUBLIC members are organizations from the public, non-profit, cooperative and industrial sectors engaged with software freedom, willing to emphasize the need to co-create digital technologies supporting both cooperation and competition among actors and across economic sectors that benefit the whole of society, both within and beyond Europe.

This community provides a working platform for PUBLIC members, partners, and supporters.

The 4 essential software freedoms put forward by the Free Software Foundation serve to facilitate adoption of free technologies and methodologies: here visitors can learn how to run free software in their organization (#use) , understand software freedom and the advantage of a public digital infrastructure (#study), foster cooperation between communities and their developers (#share), and promote best practice for developers and organizations who want to embrace software freedom (#hack).

Members of the PUBLIC can share experience, strategies, and cooperate to acquire or promote public funding of free software projects and projects that foster a public digital infrastructure. They can also cooperate to apply together for public funding (#proposals).

Feel free to start a new topic in the #agora and contribute to actualize a public digital infrastructure.

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Framasoft - PS Meeting on Contributopia

public.zoethical.org

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Last November 20th, @natacha and @how traveled to Lyon to meet Framasoft’s team, especially @pyg. Thank you for sharing a good piece of the day and giving us your benevolent attention ; we could deepen our understanding of the Contributopia themes and think altogether about modalities of collaboration.

@pyg shed light on the notions of “society of contribution” and the objectives, within Framasoft, for Contributopia ; regarding Petites Singularités, we could refine our perceptions and align our wills.

Contributopia addresses the problem of contribution, or rather the lack of contribution in the free software movement, whereas we can hear too often talk about the “victory of open-source”. The Contributopia campaign comprises two aspects : the first one concerns “contribution” (in contrast with a more passive attitude of consumption), that is to say a dimension of commitment of all in technology production (to address the problem of abandoned software, the fragility of teams and processes to aim for permanence, and to ensure engagement of people in the associated functions : translation, bug reporting, design, ideation and conception, support and promotion, etc.) ; the second aspect concerns mediation between programmes et their users, notably by framing the engagement of people inscribed in a development logic, within a larger logic of sharing, beyond social grouping, that would facilitate welcoming non-technicians in the production and not only in the consumption of software products.

This approach complements the desire of P.S.: to weave links among people, organizations and their software, as much on the development side to create synergies in the production, as on the side of usage to invent or accompany organizational techniques proper to collective practices amplified by free software. Petites Singularités developed a transnational network of people and independent organizations involved in technological production and support to people engaged in practices of freedom.

Framasoft is tooling the society of contribution, and Petites Singularités can structure the space for collaboration, creating synergies while reducing the workload for our allies. As Framasoft wishes to reduce the burden on its small team of friends in order to preserve its integrity and culture, and best serve the interests of the free software community by remaining an island in a vibrant and diverse archipelago, we wish to engage in a complementary way: we propose to promote the formation of coordination spaces. In order to pursue our initiative to bring together technological communities and foster international collaborations, Petites Singularités proposes to support tools that facilitate a process of dialogue and constructive interference between people involved in the development of free tools, places, methodologies, and praxis.

The PUBLIC.zoethical.org forum

First of all, we therefore propose to open https://public.zoethical.org so that together:

  • users can confront their daily realities with technical possibilities and collective means;
  • developers can express their needs, then define and imagine, beyond the replication of proprietary services, services specific to the logic of free culture and the commons;
  • citizen initiatives and the circles of defense and promotion of the Commons structure their technical practices into technical poles and shared infrastructures.

The structure of the forum will follow the 4 essential software freedoms promoted by the Free Software Foundation to facilitate the adoption of free technologies and methodologies: here, visitors can learn how to use free software in their organization (#use), understand software freedom and the benefits of a public digital infrastructure (#study), encourage cooperation between communities and their developers (#share), and promote best practices of developers and organizations that wish to adopt software freedom (#hack).

This forum will complement other existing forums that are already involved in one of the aspects mentioned above:

  • https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks brings together developers interested in implementing services and developing the ActivityPub standard itself with the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEPs).
  • https://ps.zoethical.org imagines a transindividual, fragile and hybrid aesthetic around collective practices and free software, to think and amplify active networks of resistance. To share, engage and care form the triangle of this “libre aesthetics”.
  • https://discuss.coding.social/ proposes to make free software development more social, promoting participatory free software development that is inclusive to all people and focused on addressing real human needs from ideation, and design to development.
  • https://community.fsfe.org/ follows the work and campaigns of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and promote free software in Europe.
  • etc.