Notices by Matti Schneider (mattisg@maly.io)

I'm at #NGIForum25 for the next two days. There will be some live conference tooting, follow the hashtag to see more.
You can also see the presentations live: https://webcast.ec.europa.eu/ngi-forum-2025-06-19
If you're in Brussels, let's meet 😊

“We need some sort of 🇪🇺 crypto. We shouldn't depend on #NIST. That's what we're building, and we wouldn't have been able to do without #NGI funding.” — Karolin Varner from @rosenpass #NGIForum25 #OpenSource

“@decidim has an average of 56 commits a day, is translated in 55 languages, even though we're not a company and no one is paying us to implement anything.” — Ali Gonzalez
The contributions come from contributors and users because they fix their own problem and there is proper coordination. That's what #DigitalCommons look like and what I'm trying to scale with @openfisca 🙂
#NGIForum2025

“The first thing we need is protection against extra-territorial laws.” Another is collaboration across 🇪🇺, with the example of 🇫🇷🇩🇪 co-production of Docs, and the upcoming EDIC which 🇳🇱 and now 🇮🇹 have joined — Stéphanie Schaer, French @dinum
#NGIForum25

“Building #DigitalCommons is not sexy. You need to clean up legacy features, update the doc, do the things no one wants to pay for” but everybody needs, and that's what NGI funding enables.
💯
We can get the features and most of the bug fixes by contributors and can find funding for reviewing and doing parts of that work. But the social and technical infrastructure work that is critical, nobody wants to pay for. That can be “overhead costs” for features but exhausting to fundraise.
#NGIForum2025

“Why don't we have a label for cloud providers that would redistribute a part of their revenue to the #OpenSource projects that they deploy, and make that label required for 🇪🇺 procurement? There are these companies that make a shitload of money off the work of others.” — @robin
#NGIForum2025

“The problem is that we don't have the institutions for industrial sovereignty, so we rely instead on project governance. So we need to think about things like levying a tax”, or in general ways to capture some of the €€ that is made at the end of the chain from #FLOSS and #DigitalCommons. — Lukasz Klejnowski
Yep, I'm tired to have to think of business models that cost a lot to establish to capture some of the value provided to society. DPI funding should be like physical infra: tax!
#NGIForum25

“We should have a very strong decrease of the administrative complexity related to funding.” — Isabelle Zablit Schmitz
#NGIForum25

“The US is collapsing into fascism, there is war in Europe, there is war and genocide in the Middle East. This is not the time for platitudes about AI. It is time to build infrastructure for democracy. We need a commissioner for #digitalsovereignty” —
Damn it, thanks @robin for saying it out loud!
#NGIForum25

“The new triangle of innovation will be between IoT, 6G and AI” 🙄 I wonder how many times I heard that already in the last 15 years (with 3G, 4G, 5G, “cloud”, “blockchain” and even “metaverse”)
We can just wait for one more year for the new buzzword and instead focus on actually giving money to people who deliver stuff that's useful to society.
#NGIForum25

“In 🇩🇪 we have the @sovtechfund, hopefully we will have something similar at 🇪🇺 level in the future, because one entity will not be enough to meet the demand for funding.” — @senficon
#NGIForum25

“For me, #DigitalSovereignty starts with meaning that no one can tell you that you can't read your email anymore.”
“I feel that 🇪🇺 has quality —Gütlichkeit— in its DNA.”
“The Commission has provided us with this amazing NGI tool to be able to support the best developers, for example if there is a Canadian that develops a credible alternative to Instagram, we can just do that” — @michiel
(nudge nudge @dansup)
#NGIForum25

“We can map out platforms ownership from institutionally owned to oligarchic” — Paddy Leerssen
#AoIR

Fascinating: we know very little of the ownership structure of Bytedance (#TikTok ), #BlueSky, or… #xAI.
#PlatformGovernance #AoIR

“Who owns #BlueSky? We don't know. There is currently in most jurisdictions much less regulation on transparency for platforms than for traditional media”, even though they are now a major information mediator.

“We call on the European Commission to propose a binding legal ban on conversion practices targeting #LGBTQ+ citizens in the #EU”. A European Citizen Initiative (ECI) is not a petition, it is a legally binding instrument.
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/
There are 6 weeks left to reach the thresholds for this one. Berlin, Hamburg, where are you??

@dansup would you be interested in a collab on tracking ToS & moderation practices on the fediverse? We @opentermsarchive would be happy to get something started on that topic :)
I know @len was also interested.

@dansup where is the source repo? I'd be happy to contribute some improvements to the French translation 🙂

I like the idea of @dansup behind the Respectful Platforms Pledge.
https://respectfulplatforms.org
I find it fascinating how it shows the relevance of 🇪🇺 regulation:
• Claims 1 & 2 are #GDPR
• Claims 3 & 4 (and 6 in part) are #DSA
• Claim 5 is #GDPR and #DataAct
• Claim 8 is in part #P2B and #DSA

“I don’t want money to compensate for infringement of my license, I want every user to have the freedom that I granted them by publishing #OpenSource software.” — Bradley M. Kuhn @conservancy
#FOSDEM