One year after the launch of our roadmap, this article marks a milestone in our actions this year, and introduces the two organizations we have chosen to support financially.
2024 is another year of organizing awareness-raising activities in community centers, schools, media libraries, and all places that question their use of digital technologies and look for alternatives, or are interested in establishing a healthier relationship with digital tools in general.
Even more so today, we are reaching out to “non-geek” audiences, who are unaware of the existence of alternatives, and who may feelwary about using any tool, without any distinction; our role is to help them distinguish between “ethical” and “less ethical” tools, and find satisfactory compromises between their comfort and their control over their own digital data.
For this purpose, we have created numerous activity frames in our documentation, which you can freely reuse for your own workshops!
Last June, we had the pleasure of being invited by l’Alpha, Angoulême’s media library, to raise awareness of privacy on the Internet.
Finally, since September, we’ve been organizing a monthly Apéro Numérique at Le Bêta, in Angoulême, to bring together people who’s either enthusiastic or curious about digital ethics, and thus create a community of mutual aid and sharing of ethical tools. We present a range of topics (attention economy, open-source alternatives, presentation of Paheko…) according to the wishes of participants.
Of course, this is an initiative we’d like to continue in 2025, and even expand if we manage to mobilize our volunteers.
A poster announcing our Apéros Numériques by @vi_hait (Instagram)
our “SSO project” is nearing completion, so that our members now use only one account to access all our services (although there’s still some work to be done on this);
All these transformations and technical improvements offer us new prospects for 2025 :
the opening of a new service offering to the public, which we hope to achieve by mid-2025;
making this service available to new associations as part of our digital support program (if we manage to support five more associations, that will already be a victory for us!)
the inclusion of our services in directories and repositories of structures that support associations, such as Émancip’Asso.
CHATONS is a collective of hosts of open-source digital services in which we actively participate since 2019.
Following on from our commitments in 2023, when we initiated a revision of the CHATONS charter, we committed in our roadmap to participate to the life of the collective, to the tune of one afternoon a week.
So we contributed to our sauce in a variety of ways:
neil gave a talk at the JDLL on the subject of associative wage-earning among CHATONS;
And in addition, we have collectively participated, in more or less scattered ways, in collective votes, monthly meetings, discussions on the forum and spreading the word about CHATONS in our conferences, workshops and stands throughout the year.
In this way, we feel that we have respected the commitment to resources that we ourselves imposed on the collective. We were also able to witness the empowerment of CHATONS over the course of the year: the collective managed to find a certain stability despite Angie’s departure from the collective’s coordination at the end of 2023, its members mobilizing to ensure self-management of recurring bureaucratic tasks.
For our part, in the course of our meetings over the last few years, we’ve come to realize the challenge of reaching out to non-initiated audiences, and the different ways of doing so: making ourselves known outside Mastodon, outside the circles of people who are already convinced, who already share our ideas; integrating networks and federations that are precisely not part of the librist / open-source communities to raise awareness among their members from the inside.
So, from 2025 onwards, we will no longer commit ourselves to contributing one afternoon a week to CHATONS, in order to devote this time to contributing to other collectives beyond the librist sphere.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we’re disengaging from CHATONS! We remain full members and participants of the collective, and will continue to take part in events to which CHATONS is invited, votes on scopes, working groups, monthly meetings and forum discussions if we have enough volunteering energy to do so (which isn’t always the case, as our time, like everyone else’s, is limited).
Once again this year, we’d like to devote part of our budget to supporting other associations that share our values and organize complementary actions.
Here are the organizations we have supported in previous years: 2021, 2022, 2023.
Founded in May 2013, Nos Oignons hosts Tor exit nodes to help circumvent Internet censorship, at a time when sites like Wikipedia are banned in many countries such as China, Russia or even Turkey or Venezuela.
The JDLL, or Journées du Logiciel Libre (Free/Open-Source Software Days), is an annual meeting in Lyon focusing on digital freedom issues, in which we’ve been participating for several years with conferences, workshops and stands.
Our booth at this year’s JDLL!
This annual convention, run by a team of volunteers, had great difficulty finding a new venue this year.
ALDIL, a small Lyon-based association founded in 1998, organized the JDLL for 25 years before giving the event its own legal personality at the end of 2023. To this day, it organizes several times a month self-help workshops on free digital technology.
It’s this tenacity that we’d like to salute with our modest financial contribution today, with a donation of €150 : let’s not forget the associations that educate, popularize, raise awareness among uninitiated audiences, through a popular education approach: this work in the field, while not always rewarding and recognized, is fundamentally essential to broadening our audiences and Un-google-ify the World™.
Through these donations (which equals to around 4% of our gross revenues or 18% of our net surplus in 2024), we hope to nurture solidarity between the various associative players as well as bring visibility to their actions, in the manner of the Copie Publique initiative in the corporate world.
We’re coming to the end of our annual fund-raising campaign, the outcome of which, while still uncertain, will be decisive for the future of La Contre-Voie.
You still have one week left before the end of 2024 to place your star on our participative constellation! If you’d like to support us and give us the means to carry out our activities, you can make a donation.
On that note, we wish you all the best for the festive season!
