Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

La Contre-Voie’s objective is to raise awareness to all audiences about ethics in the digital world, which we split into different themes:

• awareness of the cultural, technical and economical monopoly held by the tech giants (which the GAFAM are part of) and the importance of collectively reducing our dependancy towards their platforms;
• awareness to what extent personal data collection and reselling is present in the world and of the consequences that this market brings;
• awareness of the existence of a set of free/libre, open-source and alternative tools by the means of hands-on demonstrations;

In order to achieve this objective, the association, upon invitation, hosts events within multiple places (educational establishments, libraries…), and hosts services on its website as alternatives to the digital giants.

La Contre-Voie was born in January of 2019 as a student association within a tech school that regularly hosted events for corporations (GAFAMs, banks, CAC 40 companies…) in order to further spread their point of view of the digital world and to strengthen their cultural dominance.

We wanted to create La Contre-Voie in order to bring an alternate narrative to what these companies were peddling and to show the idea of an alternative digital world to students that does not rely on monopolies and instead functions through digital commons. We intervene through conferences and educational workshops.

Since 2022, La Contre-Voie has left the school in which it was created in order to further extend its activities to other institutions, because these large tech companies have been speaking in multiple schools all around France for a long time: as such, it is necessary to bring an alternate narrative elsewhere!

The association is financed via multiple means, some of which are memberships, donations or t-shirt sales.

You can find our projected budget and our different financial sources on this page.

You can, first of all, join our communication channels and participate in our internal group discussions : we are on Matrix (#general:42l.fr) and on Discord.

We regularly need help organising awareness activities or run booths in conventions; don’t hesitate to let us know if you want to help!

Furthermore, you are free to become a member of the association in order to participate in our general assemblies and to join our work groups.

You can join us via our membership form, which you can find on this page.

Our association is based off Angoulême, but we have members all around France, and especially in Île-de-France, which allows us to be rather flexible when it comes to holding conferences or workshops.

We also travel to multiple large cities on the occasion of several annual shows (Toulouse, Lyon, Brussels…).

We have a PeerTube channel on which we host most of our conferences.

Note: Most conferences are in French and are not translated yet.

You can also find the outline of our workshops and of our talks in our activity documentation.

La Contre-Voie hosts events for many kinds of audiences, depending on where we are asked to host our activities. By order of priority:

1. in educational institutions, we speak to college (university), high school or even middle school audiences (and naturally, we hold events that will not be comprised of the same content for each age group), which are not aware of digital ethics;
2. in associative “third places”, sometimes, we speak to people of all ages and all corners, sometimes, we speak to activists who are interested in protecting their privacy;
3. in engineering schools, we speak to audiences that are much more technophile, but barely aware of ethics in the digital world; nevertheless, we have the internal technical skills to develop a conversation with the same bases as these kinds of audiences.

If you work in a school, a university, a library, a community center, a public digital space, a third location, or any other structure that could welcome an intervention from us, you can contact us in order to invite us, discuss the content of the intervention and what audience you’re aiming for.

For people who work for the French Ministry of National Education, we’d appreciate if you propose the intervention to your institution’s directors in order to make exchanging easier.

We ask for a financial contribution to the institutions that invite us, at least to cover our travelling expenses (and if needed, our accommodation expenses). Part of this contribution is also meant to cover the association’s expenses, and eventually (we hope), pay for the people who hold activities for you.

Naturally, we will adapt the amount of this contributions to the means of your structure: we won’t ask the same amount if you are a student association or if you represent a structure that has multiple workers.

We encourage you to read our blog post where we present the economic model we strive for our association.

We propose digital tools as an alternative to those of the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft), like emails, file hosting or online forms.

Digital giants have a considerable amount of control over the personal data of internet users all over the world. This centralisation gives them a lot of power over our lives. We think it’s a bad thing and that it leads to negative trends (of the economical kind, of the political kind…). Furthermore, these giants make commercial use of our personal data: it’s their economic model.

As such, we host tools that offer similar funcionality, but we commit to not resell your data to anyone, to respect your privacy and to give you tools that are maintained at a human scale, in-house.

Our services are for any person who wishes to win back a bit of privacy on the Internet: associations, companies, private individuals, whichever activity they hold, as long as their use of our services is respectful of our terms of use.

They are free for you. for the most part. But nothing is really “free” on the Internet: hosting and maintaining servers costs us time and money.

The tech giants’ standpoint is to resell your personal data in order to finance themselves. Ours is to rely on your financial contributions through donations or memberships.

The use of some of our services is however conditioned to membership, essentially because of limited disk space and in order to protect ourselves against spam.

The hosters of each of our machines can be found within our documentation. We ensure that the material infrastructure is in France, and managed by contractors that are subject to French jurisdiction. We use Docker to host our services, alongside other tools.

The source code for our services is available on our Git repositories or on the website of the software we are hosting.

You can find the source code of each of our services on the page dedicated to each service.

You can also find the source code of this website et the repository that centralises all our deployment tools.

Don’t hesitate to check our technical documentation in order to learn more.

In our terms of use, we promise to respect your privacy, not resell your data and to not assume any intellectual property rights on your data.

We are, as such, legally compelled to respect these terms. There are terms that tech giants do not uphold themselves - rather to the contrary: their terms of use are legal gibberish that is difficult to understand, and they do everything in their power to dissuade you from reading them. And it works: who’s ever read Microsoft’s privacy statement?

Besides all of this, how can we prove you that we aren’t fraudulously selling your emails to data brokers? Well, to be honest, we can’t, because that’s impossible to prove. However, we believe in a digital ecosystem founded on a trust relationship between service providers and users of said services.

You don’t trust us? No problem! You are more than free to go elsewhere - and we’ll wholeheartedly recommend other services providers, because we have no economic interest in keeping you from leaving us!

Finally, we pay a lot of attention to the safety of the data we host: we update our servers and their software regularly, we try to follow industry standards in the matter (and even go further than that when we can), and we use security audit tools (see our technical documentation).

On the Internet, like everywhere else, nothing lasts forever: Google could suffer a stock crash and start charging for its services (like Twitter did), Microsoft could buy Discord and suddenly decide to migrate everyone on Skype, Facebook could close down on a whim if it is no longer profitable for its shareholders… Who can predict what tomorrow will be like?

In the same way, if our technical team is hit by a bus, or that we no longer have enough human strength to maintain our servers, or that we run out of donations, then, our services could close. However, you can rejoice in the fact that:

1. That is not on our schedule at all: not now, not in the long term;
2. If something beyond our scope causes such an event, we will warn you (as best as we can) at least 6 months in advance;
3. We are part of a collective of hosters that could take over service management in the hypothetical situation where we wouldn’t be able to manage them anymore;
4. We also need our own services and we don’t want to close them down!

You can find this information in our administrative documentation.

We have put up a diagram that describes our main expenses on our homepage.

If you would like to know what our expenses are in detail, we encourage you to consult our financial reports.

We use the Paheko accounting software for all of our accounting operations.

In order to know our accounting procedures in detail, you are free to check our our administrative documentation.

It varies a lot and it depends on the complexity and the urgency of your request.

For requests that need to be dealt with urgently, we generally answer in 24 hours. For any other requests, it could take us around a week. Our average delay is about two days.

If you still haven’t gotten an answer from us after a week, we sincerely apologise! Your email might have fallen through the net (a rare occurance, but it could happen). Don’t hesitate to send us another message if this happens.

This refers to a French procedure, and does not apply worldwide.

Yes! Our association has been recognised by the French government as being of general interest, your donations are as such deductable from your taxes up to 66%, limited to 20% of your taxable income, if you pay taxes in France.

For example, if you donate 30 €, you will be able to profit from a 20 € tax deduction; your donation will only cost you 10 €.

For companies, you get a deduction up to 60% of the amount of your donation, limited to 5% of your turnover.

For example, if you are a company and that you donate 50 €, your tax deduction will go up to 30 €. Therefore, your donation will only cost you 20 €.

We will hand you over a fiscal receipt that corresponds to the amount of your donation - this will serve as a supporting document.

You can donate on this page.

We accept multiple payment methods in order to pay for your membership, donate to us, or pay for our intervention expenses:

• in cash if you meet a Board member or a Contribution Committee member that has been appointed by the Board (do not send cash by mail) ;
• by cheque, to the name of « La Contre-Voie », sent by mail to our postal address (written in our legal notices;
• by card (credit or debit);
• by bank transfer (contact us in order to ask us our bank details). In the case of a membership, don’t forget to indicate your username in the transaction description.

At our booths, in order to pay for your membership, to donate or to buy t-shirts from us, we accept payments by cash, card or cheque.

The members of our association are organised in three categories:

• support members, who participate in our discussions and our General Assembly, that, sometimes, help with activity preparation, but essentially became members in order to get access to our member-only services or to support us;
• the members of our Contribution Committee, who actively contribute to organising activities, supervising and leading other volunteers and taking part of the discussions on the association’s guiding principles;
• the Board, the administrative representation that supervises the Contribution Committee and legally represents the association.

You can find the definition of these groups in our statutes.

In all of our discussions, we favour consent-driven decision taking.

Our t-shirts, drawn by Brume, are on sale on our partner En Vente Libre’s website.

Our t-shirts can also be found at our booths in free/libre software conventions (the Capitole du Libre in Toulouse, the Journées du Logiciel Libre in Lyon…) or any other events where we participate occasionally.

We’ve detailed the entirety of this information in our communication tools documentation.

You can find us on Mastodon, Twitter and PeerTube (for videos of our conferences). We also have a RSS feed for our blog articles.

If you wish to talk to us, you can join our discussion channels on Discord or Matrix (#general:42l.fr).

You’ll undoubtebly run into us in multiple conventions, exhibitions and events all over France (Toulouse, Lyon, Paris…). We announce beforehand our participation in events on our social media.

You can also contact us in order to set a date for a moment where you can meet up with us in Angoulême or in Île-de-France (as long as we are available !).

Brume, co-founder of the association, is a developer and a graphic designer. She made the La Contre-Voie logo, our communication tools (flyers, pins, stickers…), our t-shirts, our Contribution Committee member portraits as well as other imagery.

Neil took care of the design and the development of the website (identity and style guide, interface, page content).

For us, free/libre software respects the following two characteristics:

1. an open-source software : the tool’s source code (the manufacturing recipe for the software) is published on the internet so it can be seen by anyone, which guarentees the transparent operation of the software.
   • the software’s code has to be documented, in particular its installation procedure;
   • the code’s license has to allow its reusability by other people so that it can be improved or adapted;
2. a software that holds ethical values: not only it is open-source, but the tool is conceived in order to defend digital freedoms and its developers made it with the goal of protecting ethical and social values. Some examples that allows you to access this last requirement:
   • it does not track its users and does not transmit personal data over what is strictly necessary, or protects the user from being tracked by other software;
   • it is developed in a democratic and community-based way;
   • it allows us to reduce collectively and efficiently our dependency to the tech giants…

We summarize this definition with the following equation: libre software = open-source + ethical values.

Be aware, anyhow, that the distinction between free/libre and open-source software is very subjective, because each and every single person has a different definition for the notion of “ethics”. Because of this, there are as many definitions of these distinctions as there are free software activists. You can read Stéphane Bortzmeyer’s definition or April’s definition.

Mastodon is a decentralised social network that is similar to Twitter, with the difference that there no single central server, but a cloud of thousands of servers hosted all over the world by passionate folks, associations and other organisations.

Once you sign up to this social network, you choose the server on which you want to create an account. Servers have their own governance and their own rules. Sometimes, servers are geared towards a specific kind of audience: for example, there are Mastodon servers dedicated to roleplaying games, LGBT+ communities, gaming, litterature…

It is without mentioning that you need to read the terms of the server that interests you before creating an account. If you don’t like the rules, don’t hesitate to keep searching: across thousands of servers, there surely will be one that will fit your needs!

We have been using Mastodon to communicate since the very start.

We use Discord because our main audience is comprised of students, which are part of a demographic that uses Discord extensively to communicate. Furthermore, we want to reach people who are not aware of digital ethics, so an audience that is not on free/libre platforms like Mastodon or Matrix. What’s the point of promoting free/libre software to free software activists?

As such, we keep our Twitter account up to date as well as our Discord group, in order to guide more people towards free/libre services.

We encourage, by the way, people from the free/libre activism spaces that wish to raise awareness towards audiences that are not acquainted with free software to join the big proprietary platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok…) in order to start awareness campaigns, rather than doing so on Mastodon, Matrix or XMPP and only reach people who are already convinced.

The majority, by far, of tools by the tech giants (including the GAFAM) are proprietary, which means that the source code of these tools are not public: we don’t know what’s inside, we don’t know what they do with our data. All that we do know is that their economic model is based on reselling our personal data: which is not very reassuring!

On the opposite side of things, open-source software projects (which have public code) identify themselves as such : people who have the skills to read code can check if the software is not going to send our data elsewhere.

Publishing code represents as such a trust guarantee, which is to be absolutely mandatory in order to ensure that the software we use on a daily basis is not betraying us, or does not contain backdoors that would make surveillance or data collection easier.

The CHATONS are the Collective of Hosters that are Alternative, Transparent, Open, Neutral and Solidary. The French acronym of “CHATONS” means “kittens”. Cute, isn’t it?

It’s a collective created in 2016 by Framasoft, which brings together more than one hundred structures (associations, companies, private individuals) with the goal to offer together alternative services to big tech giants and to promote collaboration and help inbetween hosting structures.

Behind the idea of the CHATONS, a new notion has emerged, relevant and important to the mission of bringing back trust in digital tools: geographical closeness. People who need online services can reach out to the CHATONS closest to them in order to meet with its administrators, thank them, ask them questions and assess whether or not they are trustworthy.