Dear comrades/fellow workers/FLOSS critic-enthusiasts,

It’s now been two months since we published the Open Letter to the European Commission https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI?view for which we first wish to thank you for your signature.

We didn’t expect the wide outreach it got as this initiative was pretty spontaneously proposed on the fediverse by a friendly hackerspace, accordingly to our common grassroot approach of Free Software. It then spread out very quickly around the globe: in a few weeks, more than 150 signatures were added (now 187 in total), including those of volunteer communities, worldwide NGOs, small companies maintaining major FLOSS, independent workers… This reflects well the variety of our network and underlines perfectly the involvment of the actors along the whole “supply chain” of FLOSS that the European Commission (EC) needs to keep in mind.

We’ve had some very positive feedback from some insiders who reported their satisfaction to feel such a horizontal dynamic upholding their work. We’ve also heard and read some critics and discussions that the letter triggered here and there, among organisations or on community platforms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214860. We also took some time to further discuss it within some NGI consortiums and with partners involved besides the Horizon Europe funding programme to see how to step up. And we guess you all anyhow did as well and we wish to pursue this discussion with you: the Reply-To address of this email is a redirection to the group dedicated to this open letter follow-up.

In the context of the recent nomination of a new council at the head of the EC, from which we can hardly feel confident about a spontaneous support of FLOSS, we must pursue our mobilisation further on. As we founded petites singularités in this very aim to address all political issues around FLOSS (decentralisation, funding, community organisation, privacy, sovereign infrastructure and so on), we think we are all collectively reponsible for the evolution of Free Software policies.

In that perspective, we’re inviting you to OFFDEM 0x05 https://oxygen.offdem.net/pub/call-for-presence in Brussels from February 1st to 2nd. We opened a Call for Presence to pave the way for expressing the needs, means and blockers of our whole communities (from the devs to the users). We wish to determine the best ways to consolidate our software and communities fairly around the world through strategic public funding *as a syndicate*[1] should. Because reclaiming funds without thinking the underlying politics would be yet another a trap for the most marginalized of us, as Florynce Rae Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florynce_Kennedy used to say: “don’t agonize, organize!”

In solidarity with the people suffering war,

petites singularités

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[1] With @spacekookie, we use the word /syndicate/ in place of /union/ to make reference to her proposal published in Synware (syn-001) /Free Software Syndicates/ https://synware.zoethical.org/. ↩︎ https://pad.public.cat/k2AO4D_2S2Odg90mgLXThw#fnref1