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CHATONS 2024 camp report

Today we’re bringing you a blog post in a slightly different format. This is a report from alex, our secretary, on the CHATONS 2024 camp.

Last month, from Thursday July 11 to Monday July 15 2024, the CHATONS camp was held at l’Antenne, a former holiday centre that has been converted into a collective home for the past 2 years, in Sévérac in the Ile-et-Vilaine region, France.

The CHATONS collective brings together around a hundred organisations from all over the French-speaking world, with the common aim of providing alternative digital services to the web giants. As a service host, La Contre-Voie has been a member of this collective for over 5 years.

The CHATONS camp is an annual event for anyone with an interest in the collective. This year was the fourth edition, and my first participation.

Here’s a brief report on the event and the workshops I attended and took part in. The camp is organised in an open forum format, with the workshop programme decided during a plenary session in the morning.

On Friday morning, I took part in a workshop entitled “How to reach a non-librarian audience”. After a round table discussion, we summarised our positions and ideas in a number of points. I think it’s necessary to maintain a public presence (i.e. to talk about and promote this alternative outside our own spaces of conviction), to raise awareness and to help groups migrate towards alternative services, rather than focusing primarily on individuals. (As an aside, that sounds a lot like what we’re trying to do at La Contre-Voie!)

In the afternoon, a workshop was organised around the 18th litter (fr) applications. Since we at La Contre-Voie had not yet made up our minds, I took the opportunity to take part in this collective review of the applications and then vote on behalf of the association (fr).

On Saturday morning, members of the steering committee of the working group (fr) “De-Gmail-ization campaign” proposed a workshop to share their roadmap. The aim of this working group is to try to get people to migrate away from Gmail, based on the various email services offered by the CHATONS. Their starting point is the observation made by some of the organisations in the collective that many of their members/subscribers contact them using Gmail, Outlook, Orange, etc. email addresses. The strategy would therefore be to launch a communication campaign within 6 months to 1 year to support the migration to more free/ethical hosting. The working group is supported by someone specialised in communications.We were asked the following questions in advance of this workshop:

  • What would make users switch away from Gmail?
  • What would be the obstacles or facilitators to this switch?
  • What alternative email providers do you know of?

Following a round table discussion on the reasons for our presence at this workshop, we gave a quick round-up of the answers to the questions posed (in the form of large sheets of paper on which everyone was free to write). On a personal level, and echoing the idea of being present and communicating about free software, I find the idea of such an awareness-raising campaign relevant. Without committing the association, I’m thinking that La Contre-Voie could act as a relay when the campaign takes place (and why not suggest awareness-raising elements such as visuals and text in advance of the campaign).

In the afternoon I took part in the workshop entitled “How to infuse a culture of cooperation into our communities”. I went more as an observer than as someone who had something to share. We talked about tout-doux-cracy (fr), a priori trust, an election process without candidates. I left the workshop prematurely to join the one on “Algorithmic Video Surveillance (AVS) - Dangers and counter-attack”, which looked at how AVS (fr) has made its way into the public arena and how the Olympics have helped to establish its presence even further. La Quadrature du Net offers tools to identify and challenge the deployment of the AVS.

I then attended the presentation of the reaction tool, which is an alternative to fail2ban (an IP address blocking tool). I really liked the project, which follows the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. Reaction lets you define rules (based on reading log files) and actions that are carried out when the rule is applied (e.g. ban IP addresses, send an email, etc.). The tool is intended to be more accessible and lighter than fail2ban. The software’s roadmap provides for the possibility of sharing information between several servers, which corresponds to our use case at La Contre-Voie and could enable us to move away from our in-house hack with fail2ban in client/server mode via a file on an NFS disk.

In the evening we were treated to an open stage of talent and non-talent sharing. It was a lot of fun :).

Sunday morning was all about email for me. It started with a workshop on an educational tool (fr) to demonstrate the benefits of SPF, DKIM and DMARC (authentication methods for email). I’d seen the tool presented at JCSA 2023 (fr), which made me want to try it out and why not make it my own. Unfortunately, the 4G network didn’t allow me to test the tool during the workshop. It’s only a postponement ;).

Afterwards we talked about mutualising emailing. The remaining idea from the workshop is to set up a working group to propose/develop an intermediary tool between CHATONS and email hosts such as Gmail or Orange. This software would help to determine whether a CHATONS is at risk of having its emails refused. The idea is therefore to prevent (and guard against) problems with the undeliverability of email before this actually happens and be able to anticipate any risk of blocking by the big email operators sufficiently in advance (a sort of email firewall).

To conclude, I attended the presentation of the new features of Paheko (fr) (the association management software we use at La Contre-Voie for our accounting). Although I’d never used the software before, I was curious to find out more (and I quickly tested it afterwards via a demo instance provided by Paheko). There are quite a few new features, such as modules, document management and synchronisation and editing with Collabora… It was noticed that it’s starting to look a lot like what Nextcloud offers. This clarified a point about data partitioning: in Paheko data is partitioned by association, whereas with Nextcloud it’s partitioned by user account.

In conclusion, I had a really good camp. Thank you to the people who organised and ran it. For the record, this was the first self-managed camp, unlike previous camps which benefited from the involvement of the person in charge of coordinating the CHATONS. I was able to meet a lot of people whose voices I’d sometimes already heard at the monthly CHATONS meetings or even met at la constituante (fr) last October.

All in all, I have to say that it feels really good to be surrounded by people who share the same values and political sensibilities for a few days.

See you next year!

alex