La Contre-Voie is coming to Angoulême

Hello everyone,

In the perspective of organizing outreach activities outside of 42Paris, where we were a student association, we are delighted to announce that La Contre-Voie will gradually move its headquarters to Angoulême, in Charente.

It’s a new start for us: in one or two years, we hope to find a place in which to continue our popular education activities (conferences, workshops…) in order to reach a public not initiated to digital issues.

Thus, it is in Charente that we will soon ask for our approvals and subsidies which could become necessary to continue our activities, in particular in schools (high schools, universities…), goal that we presented in one of our previous articles.

🔗Contribution to OpenStreetMap

Google Maps, one of the flagship products of the eponymous multinational, has become - for many of us - an indispensable tool to travel. And yet, as for most of Google’s tools, it is a tool that is financed through the resale of our personal data (geolocation, search history…) and the integration of targeted ads in the application.

As a partner of choice for many public and private transportation companies (including STGA, the bus company managing the transportation of the Grand Angoulême area), it has a monopolistic position in the field of mapping and navigation assistance worldwide.

But fortunately, there is an alternative: a collaborative world map under a free license called OpenStreetMap!

This map, which can be modified by everyone in the manner of Wikipedia, can be freely downloaded and reused in other projects and websites on the simple condition of crediting its contributors.

And since we use OpenStreetMap based software like OsmAnd on a daily basis, we noticed that many street addresses were missing from the map. So we undertook to contribute to the map by adding several hundred street addresses from different databases (the cadastre, the National Open Address Base…).

We also made a video to present how we did it:

🔗Meeting the local associations

We got to know the collectives and activist groups in Angoulême, starting with the association Saxifraga, which promotes artistic expression and the creation of convivial moments. We also participated in the Super Marché du Bêta, an event organized by Saxifraga that gathers about thirty associations and artists in front of the local of this association, called the Bêta.

We went to the office of LAPLLA.NET (L’Association pour la Promotion des Logiciels Libres en Angoumois et sur Internet), and met its members - some of whom we had met before at the Capitole du Libre.

We discovered the Cyclofficine d’Angoulême, an association dedicated to bike repair, whose members also contribute to OpenStreetMap to provide useful information to cyclists.

Finally, we held a conference at 42Angoulême on December 5th, in order to raise awareness of Internet issues among the new class of students.

🔗Our goals for 2023

We wish to develop our activities on the Charente territory and hope to intervene in schools to hold conferences on free software issues. For this, we will need :

1. Move the association’s headquarters to Angoulême
2. To ask for and obtain approvals and maybe subsidies
3. To get in touch with the elected officials and local authorities to create links and organize new activities.

However, this sudden landing in Angoulême does not exclude us at all from intervening in other regions as we already do: we intend to continue our interventions in Paris (and notably in 42Paris) as long as we have the human and financial means.

We will continue to give you news as the weeks go by.

See you soon,

N&B