At the beginning of May 2020, the Sarantaporo.gr community network team was approached by the Mayor of Elassona, a municipality in the Thessaly region in central Greece. He was asking for help with a very common problem that villages in our municipality face: lack of access to Internet connectivity. “Sykea” or “Sykia” is an isolated … Read more
Fraunhofer ISI and OpenForum Europe are conducting a study for the European Commission which shall investigate in detail the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS) and Open Source Hardware (OSH) on the European economy. The study should identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of open source in relevant ICT policies. The Open Source impact … Read more
Apologists for proprietary software like to say, “free software is a nice dream, but we all know that only the proprietary system can produce reliable products. A bunch of hackers just can’t do this.” Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below, have found GNU software to be more reliable than comparable proprietary software. This … Read more
Open Technologies Alliance (GFOSS) and Open Forum Europe signed a partnership agreement in order to promote openness to policy makers at all levels of government across Europe. GFOSS – Open Technologies Alliance and OFE have collaborated in many initiatives in recent years that promoted the ideals of free software and open government. OpenForum Europe (OFE) … Read more
In 2017 EC DG CNECT commissioned the study for the Next Generation Internet to NLnet foundation and Gartner Europe. The internet has long been recognised as a focal point of Europe’s future, bringing enormous opportunities. However, our collective need to invest and improve the internet as a critical infrastructure of our economies and societies has escalated to a … Read more
Social media platforms regularly engage in “content moderation”—the depublication, downranking, and sometimes outright censorship of information and/or user accounts from social media and other digital platforms, usually based on an alleged violation of a platform’s “community standards” policy. In recent years, this practice has become a matter of intense public interest. Not coincidentally, thanks to … Read more
Today, on 30 April 2019, two years after the new net neutrality rules came into force, the EU Commission published its Report to evaluate their implementation in Europe. Unfortunately, the Report does not give the in-depth analysis of the situation that one could have hoped for. It ignores the fact that the respect for net … Read more
Impossible obligations create legal uncertainty March 5, 2019 — Communia Association Share this article: Since last year we have tracked the development of Article 13 of the proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market by publishing a series of flowcharts that illustrates its internal logic (or absence thereof). Now that there is a … Read more
We are facing a EU regulation which may make it impossible to install a custom piece of software on most radio devices like WiFi routers, smartphones and embedded devices. You can now give feedback on the most problematic part by Monday, 4 March. Please participate – it’s not hard! In the EU Radio Equipment Directive … Read more
Figures on availability of scientific APIs, open code policies, citizen science projects as well as case studies. What is open collaboration? Open scientific collaboration refers to the forms of collaboration in the course of the scientific process that do not fit under open data and open publications. It includes different type of outputs such as open code, … Read more
