Collaborative Culture in a Digital World

đź‘‹ Nice to meet you

  • 8 years professionnal Software Engineer
  • Developer on my free time too
  • Supporter, advocate and enthusiast about Free Software

Open Source & Free Software

What is your favorite app?

Do you have an alternative?

Internet

(and the World Wide Web)

The origins

1970s inter-connection of main frame computers

Main frame computer

Centralised network

… to a Decentralised network

An elitist technology

  • military institutions
  • Leading universities
  • research groups

… but built in a collaborative way

Thanks to RFC (Request For Comments) mechanism to build common standards

(Inspired by sciences collaborative “peer-review” process)

“Modern” internet in the 90s

Personal computers

Companies realised the economical potential

selling online services (email, chat, news) and beginning of e-commerce

Today’s digital world

Digital giants

Creating centralised software

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft

GAFAM

More powerful than ever

Their financial value, > 6 trillions $, represents more than total amount of the GDP of France and Russia together.

Source statista.com

A popular technology

… but not collaborative

Open source code & free software

Open source code

Open source code

  • + auditable
  • + transparency
  • + secure
  • + privacy

Open source

iceberg.jpeg

Open source for GAFAMs

Tools (elitist) are open-source | Applications (popular) are not

Free Software

Nice, you don’t need to pay for it, right?

Who doesn’t like free beer? 🍻

Free Software

Free speech ≠ Free beer

The Four Freedoms

Free to…

  • use without any restrictions
  • study by anyone
  • improve and modify
  • share it back

Questions we are trying to answer

How to give some control and freedom back to the users?

How to avoid centralised control from a single corporation over our digital world?

What’s blocking you from moving from Instagram to Pixelfed?

You know what’s Pixelfed right?

Pixelfed, Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon

Concretely where can we find free software?

publiccode.eu

Open letter to EU politicians asking publicly funded software to be Free and Open Source software

… Why?

beta.gouv.fr & etalab.gouv.fr

In french public institutions

beta.gouv.fr

“State Startups” to solve specific administrative tasks through digital solutions built with open source code

etalab.gouv.fr

Gather, share and open public data to make it available to all

  • Public administrative data (health, agriculture, infrastructure, demographics)
  • Public Transport data (Trains, roads, city transport)
  • Public Company/Charity data
  • Public geographic data

How to help Free Software?

Support initiatives such as publiccode.eu

Donate money to non-profit organisations supporting Free Software

Wikimedia Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe, Framasoft, April, Open Source Initiative, Mozilla Foundation

Read, listen, contribute to free software

Thanks for listening!

Questions?

More questions?

Contact me anytime