A European Citizen’s Initiative is a formal process for the European Commission to debate/discuss a proposition by citizens that has managed to collect 1 million signatures from European citizens within a year. I think the tides are turning and it might be good to ride the wave that the orange man on the other side of the world has started.
We could start an initiative to ask the EU governmental bodies to use software that is guaranteed to be European. Probably it would be better to ask them to use opensource only and no proprietary software. A citizen’s call for digital sovereignty could be understandable and even get business backing because there are even people on LinkedIn calling for the same.
What do you think?
Id support this absolutely
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It’s 1 million signatures with at least 7 countries passing the threshold (that’s important because it won’t be considered successful otherwise, even with a million signatures).
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Open source is a must have, so that it can be reviewed independently and so we as citizens can be sure nothing shady happens - at least without our knowledge… european is not enough for me. I do not wish to replace non-european arseholery with european arseholery.
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I follow this guy on mastodon (@bert_hubert/@eupolicy.social) who writes on this, I looked up his site because he publishes his articles there: https://berthub.eu/ . He seems very knowledgable and doesn’t just write on the basic stuff, which for me as a rookie is very useful and he is very good at explaining things. But aside from that, he seems very well-connected and has a large following. Whether you would go for it and need an audience or are exploring options, he might be of help. But personal opinion, I don’t think this needs a citizens initiative to be addressed, since there is already things happening. You might not agree with how much is happening, but an initiative is not gonna chance that anyway. edit: inserted a / before the @
That’s really hard to do properly. First, most people will not care, this is unlikely to reach the minimum threshold.
Second, the goal is unachievable. Like, what if a European software uses US made libraries? And if only the end result matters, what prevents someone from creating an EU entity, just slapping “Made in EU” on it, while just reusing a parent company’s software?
We’ve got to start somewhere anyway…
If it’s open source, and there is european accountability, I don’t see a problem.
@atro_city What is Fedia.io? There is surprisingly no info about itself on its website, and requires registration to see anything.
It’s an mbin instance. The admin made it login only because of AI bots that scrape the website.