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
Cloud services have become the default tools many people use to get their work done. But this can mean giving up privacy and control. Some open source alternatives are now offering tools to put people back in charge. Frank Karlitschek is a German open source developer and founder of Nextcloud, a platform for storage, collaboration … Read more
The European Data Portal (EDP) initiative does research on current topics related to open data and publishes the findings, for example, in form of analytical reports. The analytical report no 11 focuses on the challenges of PSI re-use in the public sector and gives recommendations on how to support and realise successful PSI re-use in … 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
The list of 50 participating open source organizations for Season of Docs 2019 is now available at https://developers.google.com/season–of–docs/docs/participants/. Are you a technical writer interested in taking part in Season of Docs? Please explore the list of participating organizations and their project ideas. If any of the projects interest you, you can contact the open source … Read more
The European Parliament adopted the controversial Copyright Directive by 348 votes in favour, 274 votes against and 36 abstentions. Today’s vote marks the end of years of debate in the European Union. Heated discussions about the introduction of upload filters ended up in protests of tens of thousands people in the streets all across Europe. … Read more
The final text of the copyright directive for the digital single market will harm access to knowledge and unduly benefit large corporations and rightsholder industries. Despite the text’s carve outs, Wikimedia cannot support a reform that, at its core, aims to radically control the sharing of information online. After a long legislative process, the final … Read more
This week the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital team visited Athens to deliver an information session on the eIDAS regulation and showed how – in conjunction with the CEF building blocks – public administrations can build user centric digital public services for citizens and businesses. The CEF team was met by Nectarios Koziris, Dean of … Read more
As the European Parliament elections approach, EDRi member Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) intensifies the efforts for the “Public Money? Public Code!” campaign. In January 2019, FSFE published a new brochure to serve as guidelines for decision-makers, explaining the fundamental benefits of public code. Free Software for a Free Society Free and Open Source Software … Read more
Rationale of the study visit Marseille and, more generally, the South Region are very active as far as social (and societal) innovation is concerned. The region has also a long tradition of social and solidarity economy development since these organisations count for approximately 10% of the regional employment. Since the visit will be mostly located in … Read more
