The mission of La Contre-Voie is to promote an ethical and emancipating digital environment, which does not commercially exploit our personal data. To achieve this goal, we organize awareness-raising activities and host free digital services.
In order to organize and structure our actions over the long term, we are formalizing our first roadmap, which defines the four major strategic axes on which we will mobilize our energy for the next three years._
As outlined in our introductory article in 2023, here are the four projects on which we’ll be focusing our efforts:
Launch a support program: guide collectives towards their digital autonomy with a diagnosis, tools and individual training;
Develop our own digital autonomy: host our own physical machines to offer local services and retain control over the data we host;
To achieve these goals, we want to remunerate the people who will spend their time and energy to accomplish them… So we’re launching a donation campaign to ask for your support!
In our encounters outside our circles of convinced librists, we’ve noticed that there’s no lack of willingness in associations to adopt ethical digital practices. This is particularly true of militant associations: the desire to participate in a human-scale digital world, which does not feed the hegemony of the tech giants.
What they often lack is rather the time to take the plunge and the skills to identify and use existing software alternatives, with the need to be accompanied step-by-step so that the transition to these digital tools is rapid and effective despite the change in habits it entails.
So, while our friends at Framasoft are launching Frama.space, a wide-ranging project to equip collectives, we’ve decided to focus primarily on the needs of our locality and on the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, with a priority focus on associations (employing or not), informal collectives and perhaps small communities, or even small businesses. As our members are spread out all over France, we’ll also be able to take part in other venues as and when we can!
It was part of the Émancip’Asso program training program: digital support is more than just hosting online tools and letting our audience use them independently. It calls on a wide range of cross-disciplinary skills, as it involves:
establishing a diagnosis of current practices to identify the expectations of our beneficiaries ;
defining a set of specifications to clarify our association’s action in relation to these identified needs;
implement tailor-made tools (through a catalog of applications that we will have predefined), sometimes by importing existing data;
train their staff on these new tools, in face-to-face where possible (it’s not enough just to exchange e-mails);
provide long-term support to help the structure deal with technical problems, and develop the service offering in line with its needs.
We estimate that such a support approach would require between 20 and 40 hours of work per structure, which considerably limits the number of structures we can support during the year, given that we also carry out other activities, as detailed later in this roadmap. In short, if we manage to support 5 organizations per year until 2026, we’ll already be very proud ;)
To begin with, we can already introduce you the diagnosis of digital practices that we have produced in preparation for our future accompaniments. It is destined to evolve with the structures we support. And, of course, we intend to include our approach in our documentation so that other support structures can adopt it!
Until now, our servers have been hosted by a third-party provider, as is the case with many alternative service providers. This provider maintains the hardware, and we take care of what’s installed on it. We depend entirely on this provider to deliver our digital services.
As an alternative hosting provider wishing to provide local digital services, notably through our forthcoming support program, we see self-hosting as a way of gaining autonomy over the tools we offer.
Having the physical machines that host our data at our disposal is a pledge of confidence for our audience, particularly for activist circles, in view of the major political turning points on digital issues in recent years.
Over the course of this roadmap, we will therefore be experimenting with different ways of building a resilient, small-scale infrastructure to host our services.
When we think of physical server hosting, we imagine large corridors of server cabinets in industrial-scale data centers. On our own small scale, we’d rather consider alternative methods of light hosting, as already experimented with by the CHATONS Deuxfleurs, the DistriLab or TeDomum: microcomputers, scrap computers assembled together, and voilà our home-made “datacenter”!
That said, such methods raise new issues. We’re used to the industrial quality of service of the digital giants: reliable, with high availability, that (almost) never crashes, and with low latency… If we set out to provide digital support to groups using salvaged equipment, can we guarantee them a level of reliability and sustainability that corresponds to the expectations we might have of modern digital services?
There are open-source technical solutions to create these reliability guarantees. We can build on these, even if the use of all these tools on a small scale is new ground that we have yet to clear.
Our range of services has been extensively developed and consolidated since the association was founded, but it goes without saying that their day-to-day maintenance requires considerable energy.
We will continue to maintain these services for years to come, gradually reorganizing them to fit our future infrastructure and facilitate scaling.
Hosting services at La Contre-Voie can only be done in complementarity with our awareness-raising activities.
Our vocation has always been to organize “popular education” events to reach audiences with little awareness of digital ethics. Today, we intervene in third-party associations, media libraries and training establishments, to promote a digital ecosystem that is not based on the exploitation and monetization of our social behaviors.
In 2023, we have launched our documentation platform to spread our educational content and enable others to reappropriate it.
In 2024, we wrote and published a dozen new frameworks for conferences and workshops, which can be reused at will.
For the years to come, we’ll be continuing to create and experiment with workshop and conference frameworks as we go along. These frameworks will then be documented, such as Brume’s workshop “How to make your association inclusive” or the conference “Les enjeux d’Internet”, under free license.
We still enjoy taking part in librist events such as the JDLL or the Capitole du Libre, but if we want to reach out to audiences who are uninitiated to digital issues, we need to get out of our comfort zone and discover new audiences who are unfamiliar with ethical digital issues.
One of this year’s projects will be to spark the interest of these audiences in order to highlight these issues, using communication tools and educational methods adapted to their expectations and needs.
Our actions are most effective when they enter into symbiosis with other structures. It is with this conviction that we joined the collectif CHATONS in June 2019: a hosters collective of alternative services to the tech giants.
In 2023, we therefore devoted several months of part-time (volunteer) work to contributing to discussions on the collective’s charter or governance. We also took part in the CHATONS camp, the monthly meetings, the review of applications and various working groups.
During 2024, we kept our commitment to dedicate one afternoon a week to CHATONS, mobilizing our energy in the writing of a series of interviews, conferences and participating in various activities.
From 2025 onwards, we’ll be focusing on our second goal: to forge links with other networks, federations and collectives that share similar goals, whether they’re attached to FOSS or not, so that we can reach new audiences and get out of our comfort zone. We remain part of the CHATONS collective, without committing ourselves to one afternoon a week, as was the case last year.
Although we have a lot in common with CHATONS member structures, hosting services is only part of what we do: we also organize events in media libraries, schools and other popular education venues to raise awareness of digital ethics.
To multiply our interventions, we need to meet the right people who can put us in touch with interested structures. The same goes for our support program: we need to get ourselves known to the organizations that need it, especially on a local scale.
For these reasons, we are getting involved in networks and collectives linked to our activities in order to be better referenced by our public, in the same way as we joined the Maison des Peuples et de la Paix in 2023, a network in which our association is now domiciled, and for which we provided customized digital support in 2024.
In 2024, we received 9 500 € in donations: your support has enabled us to finance our actions and build up reserve funds so that we can look forward more serenely to wage-earning in La Contre-Voie.
For this year 2025, we need 12 000 € to achieve the objectives we have set ourselves, out of a total budget of 15 000 €: we are counting on other sources of funding to make up the 3 000 € shortfall.
You can see a detailed breakdown of how this budget will be used bottom of page.
We have defined three levels, which are detailed below.
With 3 500 €, you’ll enable us not to be in deficit at the end of the year, and give us the first guarantees of our independence.
Below this amount, it becomes more difficult to consider salaried employment, and we’ll have to rely on other sources of funding to stay on track, to the detriment of our freedom of action… or else, we’ll have to revise our ambitions, and consider other ways of contributing to digital emancipation that don’t require us to devote a full time to them.
We estimate that our digital support program for associations requires between 20 and 40 hours of work per structure, and a lot of time devoted to training, understanding needs, providing support and taking feedback into consideration.
We have a policy of charging a fraction of these costs (hosting) to the structures we support, but some of them don’t have the financial means to cover them, and we don’t want them to deprive themselves of our services for financial reasons, especially when they are small associations with low budgets.
We have therefore set up a system of “solidarity rates”, where we reduce our rates on a case-by-case basis according to the means of each structure… But establishing this policy implies that the costs fall on our shoulders: if it’s not the structure that pays, it’s us.
That’s why we need your support: with your donations, you enable an association which can’t afford to host our services to benefit from them anyway. By reaching this milestone, you give us the means to continue to offer reduced rates for small associations in 2025.
🔗12 000 €, to move away from full-time volunteering
If we reach this amount, we will devote half of our annual budget to establishing our first employment contract within the year at La Contre-Voie, an essential step in pursuing our missions in the direction we have chosen.
With 12 000 € in donations, we can carry out our actions without fear of finding ourselves without means if we don’t obtain a subsidy, or if it is arbitrarily withdrawn. We can devote ourselves fully to fulfilling this roadmap, rather than spending time looking for funding to pay for ourselves. In this way, you guarantee that the donations we receive remain the majority means of financing within our association.
In short, it’s a dream, an ideal come true, with great prospects for the association’s survival, because even if full-time volunteering is not financially onerous, it offers no guarantee of continuity for the association (and for the people who devote themselves to it!). If you too believe that all work deserves a wage, help us to get there!
If you’re interested in our financial management, you can consult our 2024 financial report here (PDF).
If you are convinced by what we wish to implement, make a donation to drop your star on our ✨participative constellation ✨! If you’re taxable, your donation is 66% tax-deductible in France.
We have a dedicated page to sponsorship! We’ll be listing the organizations that contribute financially to the association, from 250 euros upwards.
This page is our way to transparently display the structures that fund us, and it’s a way for us to thank them by listing them on our site.
If you are a company or an association subject to corporation tax, you can also deduct part of your donation from your taxable income; more information on the dedicated page.
The minimum we need to cover our basic expenses, including those already incurred this year.
Level 2 − 7500 €
To offer solidarity rates to associations in need
Our digital support program come at a cost that some associations cannot afford. Help us offer them solidarity rates!
Level 3 − 12000 €
Moving away from full-time volunteering
Finally, to fairly remunerate the people who devote themselves to the association's missions.
Our funding sources for the year 2024-2025
Current amount: 4341 euros — Annual budget: 14950 euros
29 %
Last update
Donations
1943 euros (13 %)
Donations from individuals, nonprofits or companies received this year.
Educational interventions
910 euros (6 %)
The financial contribution we ask from organizations that invites us for awareness activities.
Services hosting
483 euros (3 %)
Total revenues on hosting of « à la carte » online services for nonprofits and other organizations.
Memberships
380 euros (3 %)
The total of our members’ annual membership fees
Goodies sale
625 euros (4 %)
The funds raised through the sale of goodies, mostly from t-shirts.
2024-2025 estimated budget
Here’s how we use your donations.
Click to view the detail of every expense
Financial resources devoted to the remuneration of the association’s staff.
Expenses related to technical infrastructure maintenance: domain name rental, possible server rental… May also include the purchase of computer equipment.
Expenditure on other communication tools: goodies, flyers, stickers…
Expenses incurred in printing T-shirts to be sold at our booths and on En Vente Libre. This is far from being our main activity, but it helps us to stay afloat financially.
The budget dedicated to the reimbursement of expenses related to the travel of our speakers, whether they are members of the association or external people that we bring in for our activities. These costs may also include the cost of lodging and food for our speakers when they travel.
This category includes the association’s banking and insurance fees.
The donations made by La Contre-Voie to other associations with a similar purpose.
This estimated budget has been approved by the annual General Assembly.
Thanks to your donations, we conduct outreach activities to promote the use of emancipating digital technologies that will not sell your data.
To guarantee our independence
Financing us through donations allows us to depend less on public subsidies to exist, which protects our editorial freedom.
To face the GAFAM
Your donations allow us to cover the operating costs of our servers, which host alternative services to the web giants.
For an alternative society model
To prove that small structures like ours can develop without entering into a capitalist logic, where economic interests take precedence over the general interest.
To contribute to the commons
We document our technical infrastructure and our awareness activities so that others can freely reuse them.
Tax deductible donations
In France, donations to La Contre-Voie are tax deductible at 66%: if you pay taxes, a €30 donation will only cost you €10.
