All right, I am delighted to introduce my friend Sandra, who has also added a couple of
extra decorations to the stage for the afternoon to remind us of some of the other organizations.
This is a community, a real community effort, and as we know, especially here in Europe,
there's been a lot of efforts to talk to different organizations, so excited to hear
us talk, thank you.
Hi.
It's a great pleasure of mine to speak here today at first, I see familiar phrases and I see new
ones and welcome everybody.
So, yeah, I'm especially delighted to be here because I will speak about political things,
and I hope that's all right for you, and I think it's necessary.
So, it would be about the social web and digital sovereignty, as I have heard before today.
Yeah, I would like to speak about why and how I, but also built with other social advocacy networks
in and for Europe, and I think that's necessary.
So, hi, I'm Sandra, I live in Berlin in Vienna.
By education, I'm a competitive working scientist, but I also worked in the policy field, so
that's like my glasses, I look to the fettivers.
But what is really important to me is the 15 years I work together with others to advocate for
digital rights and open technologies.
Yes. So, why do I do this?
Well, because I care and it brings me joy.
It brings me joy to build together with other people meaningful structures.
So, yeah, I hope that's visible.
Yeah, so, and building meaningful events, I would like to speak about Berlin's fettie day,
actually by now it's a whole weekend.
And, yeah, our journey starts there.
It's by now, as far as I know, the biggest new life event on the fettivers.
If you have missed it unfortunately, you will be able to rewatch all of our talks on our fettie
account of digital society, the Digital Gesellschaft and German, and if you miss the opportunity
to take fettie drinks, for example, you could have drank in a Macedon, a friendly car, a peer tube,
an on-cast or a miskey.
So, please take out all your calendars.
If you want to join us this year, it's the 11th to 13th of September in Berlin.
So, September 11th to 13th would love to have you all there as possible.
So, one goal for fettie day was actually to get the political debate going on.
And we can do that with talks like today and elsewhere.
And the idea of many of those talks there was that we need to state that public digital infrastructure
is already there, and we need to make more usage out of it.
Sorry, I slept way to last night.
So, with nearly no budget, eight months of hard work and a bunch of voluntary people working very hard for this,
I think we made a difference.
So, a lot of folks from Berlin are watching us at the livestream, so it would be nice if you can give them a warm applause for all of the work.
So, already before fettie day, there was the so-called European summit on digital sovereignty announced,
and that took place on the 18th of November last year in Berlin.
And as you can see from the announced program, unfortunately, the concept of digital sovereignty is very narrowly focused,
and social networks were not even a topic, nothing there.
So, when I saw this, yeah, I was a little bit, I thought, what can we do about it,
to bring our political demands and our concept and our broadening concept of digital sovereignty?
What can we do to bring it to the table and to let the decision makers know what exists already, right?
So, that was the reason why I tried to found this open networks alliance.
I want to speak about, so, yeah.
Because what we see right now, probably here third of it, what happens now in the debate about digital sovereignty,
that national member states of the European Union all come up with their national stakes.
So, we have a German stack, the French, doing the same thing,
and also we have a debate about different ideas about so-called euro stacks.
And, yeah, I think it's a mistake to copy the same structural difficulties,
but just make them European and then call that digital sovereignty.
I think that's way to narrow, and that's not a successful concept to challenge and to find solutions,
long-term solutions for challenges that we need to address.
Yeah.
So, instead, what I think and what's in the spirit of the alliance as well,
are those three points I would like to make that transport hour values, I think more.
So, just make it European is not enough, definitely not, that doesn't make sense.
And, if they buy stuff, they need to make sure it's at least open as well.
Just to have national stakes, that brings us way back 150 years ago.
We had that wasn't working, we shouldn't do that again.
The second thing is, if public money is to be spent and some of you will notice already,
then public digital infrastructure such as open social networks, of course, must be funded as well.
How is the idea even thinkable that they put public money and spend it into European private companies?
That's like, yeah, not a very well thought, I think.
And then the third point is open social networks, of course, should be a key part of achieving
real digital sovereignty, right?
Where shall we have our political debates?
Where shall people get informed about who they want to elect or not?
That needs to be happening in open social networks.
Yeah, so please check out Hannah's blog post about social sovereignty.
Yes.
So, yeah.
This is my slide where I would like to show to politicians decision makers to make them aware
that actually we have a stack of our own which is open,
which is comments orientated, right?
We have different hardware, we have operating systems that are all open and that bring benefit
to all of us.
And of course, interoperable social networks are part of this, right?
Yeah.
So, coming back to our alliance.
So, after Berlin 30-day, I got together some friends of other organizations working on this topic as well.
And three weeks later, we came up with a policy paper.
And three pages where we explain in detail our four demands and say exactly what needs to be changed
in the law and why, so to make it very easy to take it.
I do have to say like our long paper is translated in German French and English, but like if we would have more time,
it would be my goal to come up with demands more specific to the French case as well and for the European Union level,
but we just didn't have enough time.
So, that's the reason by those demands are most of them directed to the German case.
Yeah.
But you can see, we have four demands to have them are directly connected to the Fedivers and yeah.
Please check out the work page because I don't have that much time right now to explain it in detail.
But in order to be professional, right, what do we do?
You present the press conference where people can take and we explain what our demands are.
We did that.
You can watch that video and we have a lot of European subtitles so you can watch it in your own native language if you want to.
And then we were very likely to have test coverage as well.
This one is from netspolitic.org.
The German speaking people will notice and they covered our demands in a very detailed way which I'm very proud of as well.
So yeah.
And then the day of the summit came right.
And it may seem not as a big thing, but for me it was a big success to get representatives there.
Because like there were a thousand people and the battle to say to get an official invitation was a tough one.
So just to be there was always a success.
Yeah.
So you can see Felix, from Macedon Lili, from Wikimedia Germany, Bianca doing great work for Innovations for Band of Necheguzuntite and that's me.
And as you would have guessed from the program, our topics were not present.
We tried to speak with a lot of politicians and different stakeholders in the halls as well.
I wrote a whole blog post about how we see that event.
But like the too long version was a missed opportunity to share two digital sovereignty.
So that only means we need to push harder and get working still going on.
So yeah.
So by now, 30 different organizations support our demands and our concept.
Yeah.
And especially in this year, it's very relevant to push further because just to mention two political topics coming up this year.
So in this year, the European Parliament will discuss or is already debating this so-called multi-annual financial framework.
That's more or less the budget of the European Union.
And it needs to be finalized beginning 2027.
So this year, we need to push hard and to be loud.
Because otherwise, if we don't get the money now, we won't get any money in the next four years.
That's the one thing and the other thing is that in spring, the DMA.
So the digital market sector will be reviewed for the first time.
And yeah, it's a big chance to get into operability more spread out and especially for social networks.
And that's a very important fight where I would need all of you to be loud for that one.
Yeah, thanks.
So, I speak too quick.
As a proof of concept and as an invitation to you all, we have a panel coming up tomorrow in a different room.
We're speaking with Alexander Gaze, she's a member of European Parliament for the Green Party.
We were speaking about the Digital Service Act and the Fediverse.
And yeah, Jordan from open source initiative is hosting that panel and we'll moderate us.
And yeah, I think it's a little bit proof of concept for me that if we find structures and if we get together and if we can commit to political demands that are interrelated.
And so therefore make a bigger difference.
We are approachable to politicians, we are approachable for public and non-public events where we can then repeat and repeat and repeat our demands.
And that's what's needed.
Yeah, so I come to the end of my talk.
Whatever your school is, whatever your level of expertise is, please bring it in this year.
We need more shoulders in our community.
And if you have the time and if you have the financial resources, please join us in this effort.
Thanks.
Let us work together and project.
Let us build a little part of the world.
We all want to live in.
And with that, I wish us all a very happy first and weekend.
Let's create some memories and make us a difference in this world.
Great.
What a great message.
I love that.
We need more shoulders.
I think that's exactly right.
We need to work together on this.
So thank you.
We have time for a couple of questions.
If that's okay, Sandra.
There's, I thought I saw a hand going up.
Oh, yes, over there.
Let me come around, sorry.
Excuse me.
Let me say, in the meantime, I have some girl in 30 days stickers, which I will put
on.
Thank you so much for doing this and I really appreciate you saying that we need to change
and we need to.
Sorry, I can't hear you very.
Sorry, can you hear me now?
Yeah, I'm just saying great presentation and thank you for saying everything you said.
I just want to understand as you said, we need more shoulders, right?
How can we contribute like in a meaningful way?
Yeah.
As developers are in general.
Yeah, like if we really have time and focus if you're connected to other organizations,
like I'm really looking forward to all connections to all member states,
because I think like we need to get our networks more close.
It is part of us, but like if you are connected to organizations and
in France, for example, I'm Poland, I like more central and eastern European countries.
Please let us speak or put them forward to us.
On an individual level, both organizations and individual level, please read the policy paper.
You can share our share picks and get in contact if possible.
There are advocacy lobbying rules with just the wise.
If you are allowed to write to a politician or not, like there's some bureaucratic things.
But like, speak as often as possible to your political representatives and say,
we need money, we want support.
There are existing already existing open social networks.
We don't need to build them.
There are already there and please make use of them.
And make sure that interoperable social networks can do their magic, right?
So that will be possibilities for supporting us.
Thanks so much.
All right.
Thank you, Sandra.