We (Framasoft) are proud to present the 2025 roadmap for the project! PeerTube is improving thanks to (only) two developers, the financial support of donors, the support of the NLnet foundation, and external contributions, whether in the form of code, design (hi La Coopérative des Internets), or user feedback from hundreds of people! Thanks to all of you!
Already done at the beginning of the year
Before we list future improvements to PeerTube, we can already tell you what we’ve done at the beginning of the year.
Broadly speaking (since you can get the detailed version of what’s new in version 7.1 here), you’ll find the redesign of the « About » page, your PeerTube content as podcasts and improved playback comfort thanks to the update of the p2p-media-loader, the library that allows PeerTube to use P2P in the video player!
As for the released late 2024 app (available on F-Droid, the Play Store and the App Store), it allows you to watch videos (pretty handy for a video-viewing app, isn’t it?), have a local account so you can add videos to a « to watch later » list, explore platforms, channels and so on, all while avoiding the dark patterns of applications developed by the GAFAMs (like doom scrolling, ubiquitous notifications, etc.).
This year will see the arrival of a much requested feature: the ability to transfer ownership of a channel to another account! Currently, a channel is linked to the PeerTube account that created it. It will soon be possible for the account associated with the channel (or the admin of the instance) to transfer the ownership of this channel and propagate this change throughout the federation (as is already the case when changing the ownership of a video).
This feature goes hand in hand with the development of another much-requested feature: shared administration of a channel (see… below 👀).
Instance customisation
For many instance administrators, it is important to be able to customise their platform as they see fit (in their own image, in the image of the institution they represent, etc.). That’s why we’re working on making it easier to make changes such as the general colours of the interface, the ability to add a logo, customise the video player, allow or disallow the integration of videos according to an allowlist/blocklist, and much more… This extensive customisation of the interface will be accessible to admins directly from the PeerTube web interface.
Set-up wizard
PeerTube is designed for a wide range of audiences: institutions, non-profits, media, companies, etc. In order to simplify the configuration of a platform, we are going to develop a graphical configuration wizard that will allow, after the installation of PeerTube, to apply and display several recommended configuration rules according to the desired profile of the platform (with the installation of plugins depending on the use case: adding chat if lives are authorised, LDAP/OpenID, etc.).
Once the work on transferring channel ownership is complete, we’ll finally be able to offer the multi-user channel management! To the public, the channel will belong to a main account, but can be managed by several other users in the same instance. These co-manager accounts will have the same rights (upload videos, create and manage playlists, customise the channel, etc.) but will not be able to:
delete the channel;
transfer it;
manage the list of co-managers
These changes will be accompanied by a number of design and database changes, which is a lot of work!
But also…
This year will also see an improved warning system for sensitive content and « quality of life » features for the management and moderation of instances, allowing institutions, associations, media, administrations, etc. to use PeerTube more serenely. This will be done via shared lists of instances or accounts to be banned and also via auto-tags preventing video publication that contain specific keywords. We’re also planning to add batch action capabilities on videos, so you can update the licence of multiple videos in a single action, for example.
What the year holds for the mobile application
The mobile application is an excellent way to facilitate the adoption of PeerTube by a wide audience. We now want to expand the audience to also include tablet and TV users.
We’ll also allow you to connect to your PeerTube account, giving you access to all your subscriptions, likes, comments, history, notifications, settings and playlists.
By the end of the year, you’ll be able to play your videos in the background, stream them from your phone to your « smart » TV (initially Android; Apple TVs will take a bit more work) and receive notifications. The video player will also be improved.
For content creators, it will be possible to upload and manage your videos, start a live broadcast and manage your channels directly from the application!
PeerTube moves forward thanks to you!
It’s thanks to the trust you’ve placed in us over the years, your financial (and/or moral) support, the help of la Coopérative des Internets and the funding of the NLnet Foundation that we can offer you this roadmap.
We hope you like it enough to continue to help us!
PeerTube v7 : offer a complete makeover to your video platform !
With its brand new design, PeerTube‘s new interface isn’t just prettier (although it is). It is also simpler, easier to use and understand and more accessible. Welcome to a new era of this software that empowers creators to get, control and connect their own video platforms.
🎈Framasoft is 20 years old🎈 : Contribute to finance a 21st year!
Thanks to your donations (66% tax-free), the Framasoft association has been working for 20 years to advance the ethical and user-friendly Web.Find out more about some of our actions in 2024 on the Support Framasoftwebsite .
Let’s reflect the growth of the PeerTube Ecosystem
Seven year ago, PeerTube was mainly a tool that tech-savvy FOSS enthusiasts were happy to toy with. Then it became popular among content creators that wanted a self-hosted mirror of their YouTube/Twitch channels; and among communities who wanted to create and regulate their safe space (deaf people, queer people, etc.)
Nowadays, PeerTube is experiencing increasing success among content creators who publish original content (or exclusive content for their community), alternative media, and institutions: colleges, ministries of education, national television and radio archives, etc.
Public structures often need to share video content without attention-grabbing mechanisms or data exploitation.
Learn more about the history and values of PeerTube with this interview from the Association for Progressive Communication.
To us, this is a new step in the evolution of PeerTube‘s audiences.
That is why this year, we’ve asked La Coopérative des Internets to lead a thorough UX research (complete with interviews, tests, etc.) and help us start a top to bottom redesign of the interface. Our goal was to improve on PeerTube so it would better fit the need of those new audiences. We were clear that everything was on the table : colors, vocabulary, layout…
Well, we are proud to release this v7 of PeerTube, that lays the ground to a complete remodeling of the interface.
PeerTube design, color schemes, vocabulary, etc. has been constructed over seven years, as we went along, learning, getting help from the community. This new design was an opportunity to take a step back an get some intentions behind the interface.
PeerTube new light/beige theme
The new Light/beige default theme is calmer, easier on the eye than the original Black & orange one. We also added a Dark/brown theme into the core for the dark mode aficionados. Both aims to facilitate video browsing.
Creating those new themes was an opportunity to clean up and simplify how the interface is coded (specifically: clean up the CSS, with a focus on the variables), while limiting breakages with preexisting customized themes. It is now really easier to create new themes for PeerTube, and we hope you’ll share your creations!
PeerTube new dark/brown theme
We also updated the PeerTube lingo. There is a reason we are now using the word « platform(s) » to talk about all the servers where PeerTube has been installed.
Yes, calling them « instance(s) » has been the norm in the tech savvy-world of activity-pub enthusiasts. But, to those not privileged enough to know about the fediverse and its protocol, the word platform is self-explanatory, and facilitates inclusion.
There are lots of informations to display on any PeerTube page. The layouts and menus grew organically during seven years of development… and needed some pruning! We remodeled those menus and pages to bring forward relevant informations, and present a more intuitive way to find out what you are looking for.
OK, the « PeerTube Nightly » description is not the most thrilling one… But we trust you’ll find more intersting descriptions of your platform to inform passers-by.
For exemple, content creators used to access their channels and uploaded video in their library (where any PeerTube user can get to their playlists, history, etc. of the videos they watched). Now in PeerTube v7, there is a new section called « video space » specific for video uploaders’ needs.
In the same way, « admin » pages for PeerTube platforms administrators have now been separated into an Overview page (to get more info about users, hosted videos, etc.), a Moderation one (to manage abuses, blocking, registrations), and a Settings one (to access configurations, runners, etc.)
Platform administrators have more convenient menus (here on the overview page)
The several pages that presented the videos on a PeerTube platform (Recently added, Local videos, Trending) have been merged into a « Browse videos » page, that includes quick filters to display the same selections of content in a more forward way.
The same intent has driven the new layout of the « Discover videos » page we hope it will empower curious users.
Obviously, the left bar and header menus have been reorganized to reflect those changes and make navigation even more intuitive. You can now access your account settings and notifications from the header menu, as it is customary on other websites.
Displaying relevant information to show video diversity
A big feedback from new users was that the old interface was confusing, that is was hard for a user to know where they were, and where the videos came from.
That is why, in PeerTube v7, we have added more ways for platforms owners to customize and identify their platforms: easily add a banner (used on pages, mobile app exploration, and our search engine SepiaSearch) and a platform icon (used by the mobile application) More, the name and description of their platform is now displayed to non-registered users in the left hand menu.
Platforms banners positively pop on search results (here on joinpeertube.org)
We have also changed how video miniatures appear in all pages that lists videos. Channel avatar are always displayed so it’s easier to identify creators, titles are highlighted, the date and viewcount of the video are present but toned down. Those changes make pages that lists videos easier to read, and facilitate identifying the video you want to watch.
The redesign was also the opportunity to prioritize the interface accessibility (for impaired people). In 2023, we prepared the code and worked on what we knew… so the planned 2024 full accessibility audit (thanks to the NGI Entrust consortium) would bring as much new and detailed improvements as possible.
Thanks to the audit, we have improved on so many issues: we fixed color contrats and themes, progress bar, several components, and various screen reader issues. We added missing labels on interactive elements, « skip menu » links, underlining to links. We also improved keyboard navigation, and re-implemented components of a non-accessible dependency.
Did you know that the former orange used for PeerTube wasn’t contrasted enough to be accessible?
We sincerely think that PeerTube have caught up with accessibility issues and should be up to standards… but we know, now, that there is always room for improvement, and for learning directly from those who are concerned.
With the brand new remote transcoding tool we introduced last year, getting a transcription or subtitles for your video is easier than ever. But the caption editing tool was… hum… let’s say « barebone ». We are now introducing a new modal that makes editing captions really convenient.
Editing your captions is waaaay more fun with our new interface
We welcomed and integrated upstream a community contribution on SEO (search engine optimization), to help promote PeerTube-hosted-content on search engines. A platform avatar now appears in the opengraph tags, empty accounts and channels are hidden from the sitemap, while additional video tags are now present there.
Last, PeerTube has been translated into Slovak.
We really want to take time to thank the community that contributes to translations of PeerTube, we would never have thought that our software would one day be available in more than 38 languages.
We still have more work planned from this whole interface remodel. We hope to deliver it in the firsts months of 2025. First, we are currently finishing the translation of the UX research report from La Coopérative des Internets and we will publish it in the hope that it will help the whole fediverse community.
We will also wait a bit for PeerTube administrators to update their platforms, and then update the PeerTube documentation with new screenshots, and the new menus pathways.
Our next interface changes will focus on streamlining the channels & videos management experience for content creators (where several tools and menus added to the pile over the years). We also plan on fine-tuning the categorization of NSFW videos.
We obviously have many more items to our 2025 roadmap, but are still trying to secure funds to realize them: we’ll keep you informed as soon as we know more!
About funds, we really want to thank the NGI0 Entrust program for their grant that funded most of the work on this new version (and on the PeerTube mobile app we released last week). The NLnet team has been a great partner on the management of this grant, and the accessibility audit from the consortium has really made a huge difference.
The challenge: 20,000 times €20 donations for Framasoft’s 20th anniversary!
Even though those new developments has been funded, maintaining PeerTube, offering great (and free) support, integrating contributions, etc. happens on our own dime. And Framasoft isn’t an IT company: we’re a non-profit advocating on digital emancipation.
Framasoft is funded by your donations! Every €20 you donate will be a new balloon to celebrate 20 years of adventures and help us continue and take off for a21st year.
Framasoft is a model of solidarity:
8,000 donors in 2023 ;
over 2 million beneficiaries every month;
your donation can benefit 249 other people.
To date, we have raised €110,619 of our campaign target. We still have 14 days to convince our friends and raise enough money to get Framasoft off the ground.
PeerTube mobile app : discover videos while caring for your attention
Today, at Framasoft (bonjour!), we publish the very first version of the PeerTube Mobile app for android and iOS. A lot of care went into its conception, to help a wider audience watch videos and discover platforms, while not getting their attention (and data) exploited.
🎈Framasoft is 20 years old🎈 : Contribute to finance a 21st year!
Thanks to your donations (66% tax-free), the Framasoft association has been working for 20 years to advance the ethical and user-friendly Web.Find out more about some of our actions in 2024 on the Support Framasoftwebsite .
Even though we have been developing and maintaining the PeerTube software for 7 years, we, at Framasoft, are far from being an IT company. First because we are a not-for-profit (funded through donations, you can support us here), and then because our goal is, actually, to help others educate themselves on digital issues, surveillance capitalism, etc. and to give them tools that helps them get digitally emancipated.
Developing PeerTube has been, to us, an (happy) accident. We wanted to show that with one paid developer (for the first six years, then two), very little means (~ €650,000 over 7 years) and lots of community contributions, we can create a radical alternative to YouTube and Twitch. It also took a lot of patience. From the get go, we knew we needed to aim for a slow but steady pace of growth for the software, the network of video platforms it federates, the whole ecosystem and the audiences it reached.
Videos and live-streams are increasingly watched on mobile devices. We knew the next step to widen the audience of the PeerTube network of platforms was to develop a mobile client. Last year, we decided to hire Wicklow (who completed his last internship, before graduating, here with us), to train him on mobile technologies, develop a mobile app, while continuing to get familiar with PeerTube’s core code.
This was (and still is) a big decision: a new hire needs to be funded (our huge thanks to NLnet and the NGI0 Entrust program!), and we want to stay a small structure, so we don’t have lots of room in our team. In hindsight, though, we believe it was the right one.
We surrounded ourselves with Zenika, to get help on architecture and experience on mobile strategy. We soon realized that peer-to-peer video sharing wouldn’t be a wise strategy on mobile devices. After benchmarking different technologies, Wicklow picked Flutter for the development.
La Coopérative des Internets (French design workers-owed-company), helped us pinpoint the relevant user experience and design an app fit for videos on the fediverse. We decided, for the first release, to limit the scope of the app to the « spectator use-case »: browsing and watching videos.
We plan to share all their reports soon (early 2025), as soon as we put in the final touches. We hope that sharing this expertise and experience will help other FLOSS initiatives in their endeavor.
This preparatory work helped us realize that a mobile client was an amazing opportunity to simplify the PeerTube experience. PeerTube is not a video platform: it’s a network of video platforms, each with their own rules, means and focus, that can choose to federate with others (or not).
It is, by design, more complex than a centralized platform. One of the main feedback we got from video enthusiasts was
« I don’t know where to get an account. I don’t know where to search & find videos » (even though we maintain SepiaSearch).
Local account
Within a mobile client, we can create some kind of local account, directly on your device, so you get your watch-list, playlists, faves, etc. It saves you the hassle of finding a platform where you’d need to create an account if you just want to enjoy video content.
Explore platforms
We can also include a search engine and an interface to explore the federation of PeerTube platforms and find videos suited to your interest. Not everyone knows SepiaSearch (and other fediverse search engines) exists: you get it from the get go, in your pocket.
Highlighting platforms’ diversity
Finally, we can present content in a way that highlights the platforms, and show you where the videos/channels you watch are hosted. Differentiating platforms is a practical, visual way of introducing the concept of federation to a wider audience.
Humility check: a small French nonprofit will never have Google’s workforce nor Amazon’s money (and vice versa). But we have an edge: we are not constrained by surveillance capitalism rules, and its captology models.
Neither PeerTube nor the mobile app have any interest into grabbing your attention, force-feeding you ads and milking behavioral and personal data from you.
That is how we freed the design from toxic design patterns such as doom scrolling, curated feeds, needy notifications and so on.
It might sound obvious, but it takes real effort to conceive an interface cleaned from what has unfortunately became the new normal. Even more if you need to keep it familiar enough so it says easy to use.
A very first build, limited by (play & i) stores
We knew beforehand that fitting into Google’s PlayStore and Apple AppStore would be a challenge. They clearly weren’t ready to host a client for (not-a-platform but) a network of autonomous video-sharing platforms, published by a small French nonprofit, funded through its independent donation website.
To get through Apple’s (and, in a lesser way, Google’s) validation processes, we had to present the mobile app with a curated « allowlist » of PeerTube platforms that meet their standards.
Here is the state of those limitations right now:
Apple AppStore: limited to a very strict allowlist. Truth be told, a week before release, we are still unsure of being validated. Once we manage it, we’ll see how to widen the list & let users add platforms they want ;
Google Play Store: limited allowlist, but users can already add the platforms they want. We plan to widen the allowlist next ;
F-Droid (coming soon) and direct download apk: all PeerTube platforms we have indexed on SepiaSearch are available. If an instance isn’t declared to our index or is moderated, you can add it manually.
We cannot stress enough how their stores are not ready for independent solidarity-oriented networks. For exemple, a small « support us » donation link in our website footer or even on one of the allowed platforms triggered a « nope » from Apple.
And that’s consistent: as seen in their fight with Epic (owners of Fortnite) Apple take their share in every in-app purchases. They have an economic interest to keep your expenses enclosed in their ecosystem. Please, please: consider getting your freedom back ;).
Coming soon, in the PeerTube App
Fitting into Apple’s (and Google’s) very small boxes took time and energy, more than what we expected. We decided to release a first (incomplete) version of the app in December anyway, and gradually improve on it.
Here are the features we plan to develop and share for the PeerTube app:
Soon (early 2025)
Finalize and publish design and mobile strategy reports
Publish documentation
Play video in background
Log in to one’s account, gets subscriptions, comment videos
next video recommandation
improve on the limited platforms list situation
Then (mid 2025 (if funded))
adapt to tablets
adapt to TVs (well: AndroidTV… as for AppleTV, it will depend on their limitations)
Watch offline (for downloadable content)
Right now, we are still waiting to secure funding for those mid-2025 features (for which we have requested a NGI0 Commons grant to NLnet).
Depending on the app success and usage, we would love to add the content creator usecase to the app. But that’s a big one: upload and publish a video, manage one’s content, create a livestream, etc. We are still wondering where, when and how to get funds for this undertaking.
We hope you will enjoy this app, download and use it, and share it with your friends. This is a new gateway to promote PeerTube content, get audience to fabulous content creators, entice them to share more and boost that virtious loop.
This app is also a way of showcasing how media could be presented, when they are made with care for your agency and attention. More than ever: sharing is caring.
Obviously, we plan to maintain the app, add translations, implement bugfixes and security updates when needed: but this has a cost. We need to secure Framasoft’s 2025 budget to make Wicklow’s position permanent in our team (which is a priority to us). Our donation campaign is active right now, you can add your support here (and thanks!).
The challenge: 20,000 times €20 donations for Framasoft’s 20th anniversary!
Framasoft is funded by your donations! Every €20 you donate will be a new balloon to celebrate 20 years of adventures and help us continue and take off for a21st year.
Framasoft is a model of solidarity:
8,000 donors in 2023 ;
over 2 million beneficiaries every month;
your donation can benefit 249 other people.
To date, we have raised €84,817 of our campaign target. We still have 21 days to convince our friends and raise enough money to get Framasoft off the ground.
Lokas : Record and transcribe your meetings in complete confidentiality !
Framasoft invites you to try out the prototype of Lokas, a new speech-to-text transcription application that respects your privacy. This functional demo is also an experiment by Framasoft in the field of AI, accompanied by the Framamia website, which we present here (in French).
🎈Framasoft is 20 years old🎈 : Contribute to finance a 21st year!
Thanks to your donations (66% tax-free), the Framasoft association has been working for 20 years to advance the ethical and user-friendly Web.Find out more about some of our actions in 2024 on the Support Framasoftwebsite .
Lokas is an application (for Android or iOS smartphones) that allows you to transcribe the sound of your voice into a text file.
Basically, during a meeting: you put the phone in the middle of the table, press the ‘Record’ button at the start of the meeting and the ‘Stop’ button at the end. A few minutes later, the application sends you a text file containing the sentences spoken by everyone.
Lokas can and will do many more things, but we’ll come back to that at the end of this announcement.
Who is Lokas for?
Lokas is aimed at anyone who takes part in meetings. That’s a lot of people on the planet 🙂
However, we can share a few usecases.
First example: a nonprofit’s Annual General Meeting
Let’s imagine a nonprofit AGM. There are 15 people in the room, 2 moderators and 1 note taker. And a 2-hour meeting.
Concerns:
Note-taking is exhausting
The person taking the notes has limited participation
The notes may be incomplete (a ‘blank’ due to a bathroom break).
What does Lokas offer?
Lokas assists the note-taker, making it easier for him or her to participate (while still allowing for a pee break!).
Example of a transcription of a voice exchange using the Lokas application.
Second example: a workshop with teenagers
A workshop run by the ‘ Les petits débrouillards ’ association. 3 groups of 5 teenagers. A majority of girls in the groups.
Concerns:
Note-taking can be very complicated.
Boys monopolise the floor
What does Lokas offer?
Lokas makes it possible to keep a record (audio and written) of what was said. It also makes it possible to compile statistics on speaking time, particularly by gender, so that we can see for ourselves that boys leave very little speaking time for girls.
Example of transcription of a voice exchange using the Lokas application
Third example: a video meeting in a foreign language
Your activist collective is close to a Spanish association. Camille, a volunteer from your group, who speaks a little Spanish, will be doing the video with her contact in Madrid. The video will therefore take place in a foreign language.
Concerns :
You need to be able to listen again with your head down
You need a French transcript to share with board members.
What does Lokas offer?
With Lokas, Camille will be able to listen to the video again, automatically transcribe it into French, and share it from your smartphone (by email, via Signal, Matrix, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc).
Lokas is just a tool. It can assist you in taking notes. However, like any tool, it shouldn’t exempt you from using your brain!
Writing (another highly sophisticated technology) was invented at least 3,000 years ago. So humanity has been able to get together and keep written records for at least that long. Without AI. Without smartphones. Don’t throw away several millennia of technology with the water of AI. A tool like Lokas could be useful in some cases, and completely gimmicky, even unproductive, in others. This is reminiscent of the concept of Pharmakon, a concept dear to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler: Lokas, like any technical object, is simultaneously poison, remedy and scapegoat.
The web, for example, is both a technological device enabling participation, and an industrial system dispossessing Internet users of their data in order to subject them to omnipresent marketing that is individually traced and targeted by user profiling technologies.
In the same way, Lokas can be emancipating (by facilitating participation rather than note-taking), or on the contrary restrictive (meetings in a noisy bar can be interesting, but we shouldn’t do without them because the tool works better in a quiet environment), or frustrating (« The application has crashed, I don’t have any backup notes! Technology is shite! »)
Lokas, like a car, a hammer or a pen, is not a ‘neutral’ tool. It’s up to you, collectively, to decide whether and how you want to use it.
Inevitably, it won’t work as well – CC-By SA Gee
‘This is the story of an app…’
We thought it would be interesting to tell you how the Lokas app came about. It means lifting the curtain on what goes on behind the scenes at Framasoft, and understanding how we can decide to do (or not to do) such and such a project. It’s also about showing that sometimes, with a bit of luck and a bit of elbow keyboard, you can do things that might seem impossible. However, as this part is not essential, we’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not you want to read it.
Click here to read the (improbable and fabulous) origin story of Lokas
The idea for Lokas has been in the head of pyg, a member of Framasoft, for three or four years now.
The original idea (code name: ‘ Brewawa ’) was mainly to come up with an application that would be able to calculate the speaking time of participants in a meeting. The (not at all hidden) aim was to easily demonstrate that during a discussion with people of different genders, it is overwhelmingly men who monopolise the conversation.
Various tests have been carried out in recent years (hi Gee, hi bnjbvr !) to study the feasibility of such an application. But the fact is that in 2020, even if the technical possibilities were there, they weren’t really available to our tiny association, especially on a project piling on all those that Framasoft was already carrying out.
‘It’s all about technical improvements…’.
However, with the evolution of softwares such as Vosk and Whisper, audio transcription capabilities (i.e. the ability to transform the sound of sentences into text) have considerably improved.
So much so that today, these technologies are used by a huge number of software applications (from YouTube and PeerTube to BigBlueButton and WhatsApp), and are often even integrated directly into devices (Samsung has clearly made this a selling point).
The last decade has also seen improvements in ‘diarization’ processes. This rather barbaric term is in fact the technique used to identify different⋅es speakers in a discussion. For example, if Alex, Camille and Fred are having a meeting, the diarization will know how to attribute to each their sentences (no, the software won’t guess the person’s first name, but it will know – more or less – identify that there were three participants, and say ‘This sentence was uttered by person #1. This sentence was said by person #2.’, etc.
This is obviously an essential phase in being able to understand ‘who said what’ in a meeting.
This process is still imperfect, but it is improving month by month. We therefore need to look ahead to 2026 or 2027 to imagine truly reliable diarization, but today it is ‘sufficient’ in 60 to 80% of uses under ‘good conditions’.
‘It’s the story of an alignment of planets…’.
It just so happened that Framasoft had the skills needed to develop such an application.
Chocobozzz, developer of PeerTube, had already worked hard on the process of integrating Whisper into PeerTube, in order to be able to automatically generate subtitles for a video. So he’s very familiar with Whisper, its configuration options, its performance and so on.
Wicklow, developer of the PeerTube application, has been working for several months with the Dart language and Flutter SDK, which enables an application to be developed for different terminals (Android, iPhone, computer/tablet, web, etc.) in a single code base.
Luc, our favourite system administrator (it’s not complicated, mind you, we only have the one 😅 ) manages Framasoft’s entire technical infrastructure (around sixty physical computer servers). So setting up the machine that manages the transcriptions, installing it, securing it, etc, was child’s play for him.
pyg, former director of Framasoft, now the association’s digital services coordinator, has managed countless projects for Framasoft over the last 20 years. So one more, even in the middle of a campaign, wasn’t going to stop him.
With this range of skills, and the technical capabilities of the transcription and diarization software, the planets were aligned to launch such a project.
‘It’s all about luck…’
However, as is often the case, you also have to rely a little on chance or luck.
Indeed, pyg had somewhat dropped the idea of this application, simply out of ignorance of the technical advances in terms of diarisation.
It was while discussing the idea of this application at the last Framacamp, in July 2024, that Wicklow dropped a piece of information in the nick of time: ‘Ah, but you know, Whisper now does proper diarization.’
BIM 💣
‘Ah, very interesting! But I imagine it would take a long time to develop such a free transcription application?’ asked pyg.
‘Oh, I’d say in 3 days I can have a working prototype if Chocobozzz takes care of the server part.’
BANG 💥
So instead of enjoying his evening playing poker, pyg went off to his room and prepared a presentation of a dozen slides on a potential application project, which he presented to the association the following morning.
One of the slides produced overnight…
Some members were enthusiastic, others less so. And we can understand them: first, because it was adding yet more work to an already particularly busy and exhausted association. More, this project would use software derived from artificial intelligence, a technology about which we are (unanimously) very critical.
However, this application, which was to become Lokas, seemed to us to be a good way of ‘embodying’ the social purpose of Framasoft: to educate the public about the challenges of digital technology and the cultural commons.
This enabled us to move away from the pedagogical aspect, which is both essential and insufficient in terms of appropriation and self-determination. By creating a ‘manipulable digital object’, we could use Lokas as an additional opportunity to explain what AI is, its possibilities, but also its weaknesses. And so return to our ‘Pharmakon’ mentioned above.
What’s more, as well as being able to assist any collective holding meetings, this enabled us to put into practice, in concrete terms, an application bearing our values: a user-friendly tool, not exploiting users data, under an open licence, aimed above all at people who are changing the world for more social progress and social justice.
In the end, the majority of members present said: ‘Let’s go for it!’.
‘It’s (also) a story of limits’.
As mentioned above, the constraints were considerable.
A project inevitably costs time and money. Time and money that can’t be used elsewhere.
In discussions with Thomas and Pouhiou, co-directors of the association, it was decided that Lokas should remain a project subject to strict limitations: it should cost less than €10,000 all-included; it should not have a major impact on the missions of Chocobozzz, pyg or Wicklow; and it should be completed (in ‘wasted time’) between mid-September and mid-November (in particular because of the validation deadlines for the Android and iOS stores, which we don’t control).
With such constraints, it was impossible for us to produce a well-finished product. So we’ve decided to focus instead on making a prototype available. Think of this prototype as a showroom house. We’ve produced this version not by focusing on a long-term project, with solid foundations, but rather as a ‘proof of concept’, developed rapidly, to see if the concept is sufficiently attractive and interesting for us to priorise the development of this application in 2025 (if donations are sufficient, that is!).
To give you enough ‘desire’ to see a version 1.0 of Lokas arrive one day, we called on the skills of Atelier Domino to create a logotype and a graphic charter. This led us to create the project website in-house : lokas.app
At the same time, Wicklow and Chocobozzz set about developing the prototype and the transcription server.
‘It’s a story just waiting to be written…’.
A fortnight’s work later (and an estimated cost of €7,500 all-in, with roughly half the time spent by Framasoft and half on services: Domino workshop, server hire, domain names, validation of Google & Apple app stores), we can proudly and somewhat anxiously present our prototype!
Lokas, like all transcription tools, is imperfect. Outside noise, poor articulation, a faint voice in the background, people cutting each other off… These are just some of the reasons why transcription can be difficult.
As a result, plan to be in a quiet room, place the telephone in the centre of the table (the better the sound quality, the better the transcription), don’t hold several discussions at the same time, and… take ‘old-fashioned’ notes (paper+pencil, computer+pad, etc.) in case of problems.
Once you’ve done that, it’s very simple.
AI isn’t magic: Lokas needs the right conditions – CC-By SA Gee
2. Start recording
Simply click on the ‘Record’ button. Position the phone so that it can best pick up the exchanges. And start your meeting.
Record your meetings with Lokas
To limit abuse, recordings are limited to 5 per day and per device.
Note that the language model managed by Lokas means that it can already be used in around fifty languages, including: Dutch, Spanish, Korean, Italian, German, Thai, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Indonesian, Mandarin, Swedish, Czech, French, Japanese and, of course, English! Other languages are supported, but recognition will be less effective.
At the end of the meeting, click ‘Finish’.
3. Send your file for transcription (and be patient)
You may wish to listen to your file again before clicking on ‘Send’.
Your file will then be sent to our server where it will be queued for transcription.
This stage can take from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the number of files in the queue.
You can check manually whether your file has been transcribed, or wait quietly for the notification (the verification task is carried out every 15 minutes).
The screen showing that the audio file has been sent to the Framasoft servers.
Once the transcript has been received
Once you have received the transcript, you can display it in Lokas.
You can of course share it (with the application of your choice: email, Signal, WhatsApp, etc.) to correct it.
Display of the sharing menu (audio or text) in Lokas. The transcript in the background.
You can also see the speaking time statistics (NB: this feature is relatively experimental). If you wish, you can assign a first name (or pseudonym) to each participants to make it easier to read the notes. To obtain speaking times by gender, you can also allocate them manually, obviously ensuring that you have the consent of the people concerned to communicate this information. Note that this information is voluntarily manual, and does not leave your phone, and is therefore not transmitted to Framasoft nor anyone else.
Overview of speaking times, as well as names and genders of participants (none of this information is transmitted to Framasoft)
Confidentiality point: one of the special features of Lokas is that we respect your privacy: the audio file is recorded on your phone. At your request, it is sent to our servers, which will then transcribe it. Once the transcription is complete, a notification is sent to your phone; when you open (in ‘My files’) the meeting in question, the transcription is then downloaded to your phone. Once this stage has been completed, and after a slight delay to ensure that everything has gone well technically, everything is deleted from our server: the audio file as well as the transcript. And if you give us names, pseudonyms or genres for statistical purposes, please note that we do not process this information in any way.
At Framasoft, we are not at all fans of AI. We think that this technology (or rather this set of technologies) poses more problems than it solves. In fact, we tried to summarise our position on AI on the Framamia website, which we present here on the Framablog (in French).
So, isn’t it contradictory to use AI in Framasoft applications such as Lokas or PeerTube?
In our opinion, no. For several reasons.
Firstly, as we wrote on the Framamia website, not all artificial intelligence models are created equal. Whisper, the software used for transcription, is a ‘specialised’ AI, not a ‘generalist’ AI like ChatGPT, for example.
‘Specialised models are optimised to solve a specific task efficiently. Their impact is often controlled, and may correspond to that of other software’.
Whisper is certainly an AI, but it runs ‘in isolation’ on our servers.
The algorithms used are more complex than a ‘Remove the red eyes from this photo’ filter with GIMP or Photoshop, but it remains a relatively simple model (with an input/output process) that uses infinitely less energy than a training model. In fact, inference (the process of using the model to perform a task) consumes much less energy thantraining. For example, running Whisper to transcribe an audio file lasting a few minutes requires relatively modest computing power.
Finally (and most importantly), with Lokas or PeerTube, we remain consistent with one of the values at the heart of Framasoft, namely respect for the confidentiality of your data. Indeed, we do not make any use of your files, apart from the task explicitly requested, for example transcription. They are not used to enrich an AI model based on your discussions, your identity, etc. We don’t keep audio or text files, we don’t have access to the names/first names/genders that you manually assign to participants⋅es in a discussion (that stays on your phone), etc. And, of course, your data is NEVER monetised.
In short, Framasoft doesn’t care about the content of your data, it belongs to you and is nobody’s business but yours.
Despite this, we respect the point of view of people who wish to boycott AI, and we understand the contradiction they might find in a technocritical association like Framasoft proposing projects using AI.
Our aim is to offer a tool that will enable people to think about the issues in a concrete way, so that they can form their own opinions and come to their own conclusions.
A mechanical parrot takes notes: quite a symbolic Illustration by David Revoy – Licence: CC-By 4.0
When is Lokas coming?
You can Download the Lokas app on the Play Store, iOS (still in TestFlight on iOS, because they are 🤬… let’s say picky EDIT : it’s now available), (and soon on f-droid), or get the android apk directly from us here. But keep in mind it is a prototype (if you haven’t already, take two minutes to read ‘The Lokas Story ’ and understand why), so it’s normal that lots and lots of things don’t work!
We’ve already taken time, energy and a bit of money out of limited resources (did anyone ever tell you that we only live off your donations? 😉 ). And, obviously, this POC is open source, the code is publish here on our forge.
So before going any further, we need to confirm that you are interested in this project.If the donations aren’t big enough, or if the contradictions are too strong: we’ll stop there (the code is free, so it won’t be ‘lost’).
If, on the other hand, you find it relevant, there are countless possibilities for future developments. For example:
Complete redesign and accessibility (in prototyping mode, we went very fast, and Lokas is therefore very perfectible);
Ability to (re)transcribe the file of your choice (from Lokas, a video or another application, for example);
Add a ‘web’ mode to the application. This means you can use Lokas from your computer (similar to the Scribe server used by our friends at the Céméa);
Add the possibility of automatic summaries of the transcripts, to quickly find the key points;
Translate the application (and the website) into languages other than French and English;
Ability to edit and correct the transcript directly from your phone;
Provide the option of obtaining the transcript in the language of your choice (e.g. a meeting in English transcribed into French, or vice versa);
etc
But to do this, we’re going to need some staff time, and therefore money. So, at the risk of sounding insistent, we invite you, if you can, to make a donation.
The challenge: 20,000 times €20 donations for Framasoft’s 20th anniversary!
Framasoft is funded by your donations! Every €20 you donate will be a new balloon to celebrate 20 years of adventures and help us continue and take off for a21st year.
Framasoft is a model of solidarity:
8,000 donors in 2023 ;
over 2 million beneficiaries every month;
your donation (66% tax deductible) can benefit 249 other people.
To date, we have raised €58,625 of our campaign target. We still have 29 days to convince our friends and raise enough money to get Framasoft off the ground.
Once again this year, we asked David Revoy to illustrate our year-end campaign. And on this last day of 2023, it’s time to give a little nod to this important work!
🦆 VS 😈: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
Cliquez sur l’image pour soutenir l’ensemble des mascottes de Framasoft – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
An animated donation bar
Did you notice? The monsters started the campaign very serenely, enjoying grilled data skewers. But as you donated more and more, they became more than a little concerned…
Our cheerful mascots face off against some rather repulsive Datavöres
Each Framasoft mascot, representing one of our projects, stood up to a monstrous, unattractive GAFAM. But did you notice that our mascots were showing signs of life?
Once again, we’d like to extend our warmest thanks to David Revoy, who has been working with us since 2017 to illustrate our work and hopes with talent, heart and intelligence.
Speaking of success, last night, we’ve reached our fundraising goal to meet our 2024 budget!
We’d like to take this last day of our review to thank all those who have worked, discussed, shared, supported, encouraged, criticized… and contributed to our actions. The Internet isn’t big enough to mention all of you at least as much as you deserve, but you know who you are and from the depths of our little hearts we modestly say: thank you.
Thanks ! – Clock to visit the « Support Framasoft » website
Thanks to you, we’ll have the means to continue our work over the coming year (well, if some of you want to give us a bit more means, we won’t say no… but that’s not the point!). Above all, thanks to you, we feel supported.
We hope you have a wonderful end to the year, and we send you ou best wishes of emancipation, joy and freedom in 2024,
The members of the Framasoft association
Framasoft in figures, 2023 edition
What is the concrete impact of our association’s actions? That’s the question we like to answer at the end of the year: taking the time to quantify our actions is essential if we are to realise the service we can provide to others. Let’s get ready for Framastats 2023!
🦆 VS 😈: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
Click to support us and help push back Hydrooffice – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
As for our online services…
More than 1.8 million people visit our websites every month: that’s twice as many people as visit Disneyland Paris every month! This figure is up 16% on last year, so it’s pretty crazy (and very motivating) to think that what we do is useful to so many people. And what about service by service?
Click here to support us and help Espéhef and Ahèmvé – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Framadate
Framadate allows you to create mini-surveys, for example to find the right appointment time. And in figures, Framadate is:
33,785,780 visits in 2023
1.2 million hosted surveys in 2023
80,000 more surveys created than in 2022
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framadate
Framapad
Framapad allows several people to write on the same document. Framapad is undoubtedly one of the largest Etherpad services in the world, with:
510,900 pads currently hosted
Several million pads hosted since the launch of the service
309,000 accounts on MyPads (+ 60,000 compared to 2022)
More than 5 million visits in 2023
Graph showing the distribution of pads according to our Framapad instances (annual, bimonthly, weekly, half-yearly, monthly pads and Mypads accounts).
Framalistes and Framagroupes
Framalistes and Framagroupes allow you to create email discussion lists. As the Framalistes server had reached its maximum capacity, we opened Framagroupes in June 2023 to continue offering this service, which we consider essential. Framalistes and Framagroupes are undoubtedly the largest discussion list servers in existence (excluding the web giants), with:
more than 1.1 million users
63,900 open lists
An average of 280,000 messages sent per working day
Framaforms
Framaforms makes it easy to create online forms. Framaforms in figures:
867,000 visits per month
418,628 forms currently hosted
172.289 forms created this year
Graph showing the evolution of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framforms (it’s going up!)
Framacalc
Framacalc allows you to create collaborative spreadsheets. It may also be the largest Ethercalc database in the world, with:
4,235,879 visits in 2023
218,000 hosted spreadsheets
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framacalc
Framateam
Framateam is a chat service that allows teams to be organised by channel. It is probably one of the largest public Mattermost instances in the world, with:
148,870 users of the service (5,582 of which log on daily)
29,665 teams
168,102 discussion channels
More than 43 million messages exchanged since the launch of the service
Graph showing the distribution of messages sent to Framateam over a month (note the very high usage during the week!).
Framagit
Framagit is a software forge where developers can publish their code and contribute to the code of others. Framagit is probably one of the largest public Gitlab servers in France, with:
70,679 hosted projects
49,642 users
8,966 forks
149,789 issues
91,623 merge requests
1,764,909 commit notes
Screenshot of the Framagit homepage
Framacarte
Framacarte allows you to create maps online. And in figures, it’s:
2,770,510 visits in 2023
6,690 users (+ 1,246 in one year)
170,845 hosted maps (+ 33,476 in one year)
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framacarte
Framatalk
Framatalk allows you to create or join a video conference room. And in numbers, that’s
656,765 visits in 2023 (+45% compared to last year)
An average of 75 active conferences with 200 participants per working day
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framatalk (note the huge spike during the year of lockdowns!)
Framindmap
Framindmap allows you to create mind maps. In numbers, Framindmap is:
295,379 visits in 2023
1.13 million hosted mind maps
489,690 users
Graph showing the number of visits (blue) and page views (orange) to Framindmap
Framavox
Framavox allows a group of people to meet, discuss and make decisions in one place. Framavox is probably one of the largest existing instances of the excellent Loomio software, with:
Framadrive, the document storage service, is no longer open for registration, but it’s still working! And in numbers, that’s:
10.8 million files
4,794 users
2.6 TB of storage used
Framapiaf
Framapiaf, an installation of the microblogging software Mastodon, is no longer open to new registrations, but remains very active. In figures, there are:
1,500 users who have registered in the last 30 days
850 users who have posted at least one message in the last 30 days
The care given to our online services – Illustration by David Revoy
Technical infrastructure
To the best of our knowledge, Framasoft is the world’s largest web host for online services. And a priori, this associative operating model doesn’t exist anywhere else! In figures:
58 servers and 60 virtual machines hosting our online services
0.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent for the annual electricity consumption of our technical infrastructure (our host, Hetzner, uses renewable hydro and wind energy)
1 full-time sysadmin and 2 technical support staff
The online services we provide to the public are not the only things that keep us busy. Here are some figures on some of the other things we’ve been up to this year.
It’s thanks to your donations that Espéhef and Ahèmvé are facing Hydrooffice. Illustration de David Revoy
Internally
Framasoft has 28 volunteers and 11 paid employees
45 presentations in 2023, face-to-face and/or online, on digital technology, the cultural commons and related issues
over 130 articles published on the Framablog in 2023
It’s thanks to your donations that we can guarantee the total financial independence of the association: the freedom to experiment, to continue, to fail, to stop, to continue our projects, from the most serious to the most mad, always in line with our associative project of popular education on digital issues and the cultural commons. And in figures:
93% of our budget comes from donations
5,463 donors finance initiatives that benefit more than 1.8 million people every month
70% of the budget is spent on salaries
Breakdown of Framasoft’s budget (in order: Human resources, Servers and domains, Operating costs, Interventions, Communication, Project services, Bank charges and tax)
Once again this year, we need you, your support, your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply the number of ethical digital spaces.
If we want to balance our budget for 2024, we only have 3 days left to raise €48 000: we can’t do it without your help!
There was one more present left at the foot of the Christmas tree… The French free software directory and founding project of Framasoft is evolving once again, into a site that’s nicer, simpler, more ergonomic… and a lot more practical for recommending your favourite free software!
🦆 VS 😈: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
There was one more present left at the foot of the Christmas tree… The free software directory and founding project of Framasoft is evolving once again, into a site that’s nicer, simpler, more ergonomic… and a lot more practical for recommending your favourite free software!
We have used all these lessons to create this new “2024” version of Framalibre, which we are proud to present to you today on Framalibre.org.
Framalibre 2017
Framalibre 2024
🎀 An obvious simplicity 🎀
So, for people who were used to the previous version of Framalibre, we warn you: it’s going to leave a gap… You have every right to exclaim “but where’s all my junk?” … But for many newcomers to the world of free software, that was the problem!
Maiwann has done a lot of usability testing for us, especially at conferences and at the stands where we meet. These tests helped her to realise, for example, that putting a simple ‘mail’ label on the home page wasn’t helping people who were ‘looking for an alternative to Gmail’.
So for this new version, we’ve made a radical choice: simplicity. So we’ve gone to great lengths to simplify menus, sub-menus, drop-down menus, labels, boxes, notes, buttons, and so on.
Framalibre 2017
Framalibre 2024
This radical choice for simplicity came at a price: we had to refocus the Framalibre directory on digital tools. The previous version wanted to open up to free culture, objects and structures. But the problem with doing a bit of everything is that it’s hard to do everything well: presenting all open source resources meant multiplying menus and categories, while increasing the complexity of creating a listing.
The new Framalibre site is deliberately bare bones. It welcomes you with a page displaying tags (the most frequently used search terms) and a search bar. Goodbye the meta-categories, categories, sub-categories and sub-category filters… In short, the tree structure inherited from the 2001 directory!
Our aim is to respond as quickly as possible to your need to find free software to do what you need to do, or to find an alternative to the service provided by the web giants that you want to free yourself from: you search, you find.
Results for Photoshop search on Framalibre 2024
📃 Under the hood, the pages 📃
Click on GNU and Tux to support Framalibre! – illustration David Revoy – License : CC-By 4.0
For the more technical among you (the rest of you can skip straight to the next part ^^), this simplicity can also be found under the hood.
Framalibre 2017’s Drupal 7 needed a good upgrade, which takes time and energy. The entries database was difficult to access: while we’d done a good job of tinkering with something so that it could be used by others, we would have had to spend more time and energy developing a practical, documented API…
Instead, we decided to devote this energy to applying this choice of simplicity to the software itself, by making the new Framalibre a static site, which we hope will be lighter and faster. The code for this tool, based on Jekyll software, was developed by the talents of l’Échappée Belle (thanks to Fanny and David <3), and of course it’s free and available online.
This choice of static allowed us to modify the structure of the entries and the database. Now written in markdown, these records can be read by both humans and scripts (as long as your robots remain well-behaved, of course :p). As the Framalibre records are CC-By SA, we hope that making them more accessible and readable will lead to some interesting re-uses!
We’ve also taken the opportunity to simplify the manuals as much as possible: you won’t find any screenshots of the software, for example. After a few years, these images are often outdated and misleading. From now on, the information presented in a manual will be simple and concise, and if you like this first look at a particular free software product, we invite you to find out more on the official website.
Entry for Krita on Framalibre 2024
🎁 “Here, this is what I use to free myself…” 🎁.
Click to support us and help to push back MS Blue Scream – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Because our goal is not for you to stay on Framalibre as long as possible (yes, in the game of attention economy, Framasoft is frankly – and deliberately – bad 😉 ). On the contrary, Framalibre aims to be a mediator, a ramp to take you to the official site of the free tool that meets your needs.
In addition to being a search tool, we have designed this new Framalibre as a tool for recommending free and ethical alternatives. Whether it’s during the preliminary surveys and tests for this redesign of Framalibre, during the regular meetings we attend, or even when we look at how we operate ourselves… we observe the same constant:
It’s much easier to adopt a free tool when it comes highly recommended by people we trust.
This is how we came up with the idea of adding a “used by Framasoft members” box at the top of certain search pages. This doesn’t mean that other software isn’t as good, or that it won’t meet your specific needs: it just shows the free software and services that we use regularly.
[capture mini-site]
💝 Framalibre mini-sites: offer your choices! 💝
With this new version of Framalibre, we wanted to go even further to encourage peer-to-peer recommendations. We know from experience that a person who uses free software today is a person who will help those around him or her to liberate their digital use tomorrow.
On the new Framalibre, you can make your own selection of free tools and get a link to a page that you can share with your friends and family!
Just for fun, here are a few examples we’ve put together for you:
We look forward to hearing your choice of free tools!
GNU and Tux against MB Blue Scream – Illustration David Revoy – License : CC-By 4.0
🤝 Collaboration is about sharing! 🤝
Of course, Framalibre is and will remain a collaborative directory. Whether you want to add a record to the directory or correct an existing record, contributions are just a click away!
What’s more, we’ve made the whole process a lot easier (you can see there’s a theme here!). The downside is that your submissions will be reviewed by our team of moderators before they are published (rather than being moderated after submission, as was previously the case).
The upside is that there are already almost 1,019 entries to discover, like so many of the solutions that open source communities offer each of us to make our digital practices better.
And if you can’t find the entry for that great free software or application that freed you from the web giants… feel free to add it: you’ll see, it’s (unsurprisingly) easy!
So now it’s up to you!
It’s up to you to use Framalibre to find, share and, above all, recommend the free tools that make your digital life easier… and life in general!
Because, yes, at the end of the year, we need you, your support and your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and create more ethical digital spaces.
So we’ve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our ‘Support Framasoft’ page, which we invite you to visit (because it’s beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible:
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have just 5 days left to raise € 71 398 : we can’t do it without your help !
Until 2022, the time spent on Emancip’Asso was mainly used to find funding for the project, set up and run a steering committee and organise training for ethical service providers, but it was in 2023 that the project really took off. We’re well on the way to enabling associations that want to free themselves from the digital tools of the web giants to find structures that can support them in this transition.
🦆 VS 😈: Let’s take back some ground from the tech giants!
Click to support us and push back Toxicloud – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
Emancip’Asso, a 4-part project
Conceived in 2021 in partnership with Animafac, co-piloted by a large number of organisations from the popular education, voluntary and digital sectors, and integrated into our roadmap “Collectivese Internet / Convivialise Internet”, the main objective of the Emancip’Asso project is to bring together ethical digital service providers and voluntary organisations in need of support in their emancipatory digital transition.
In order to achieve its objective, the project will include 4 actions:
Training for providers of ethical online services;
An online course, a digital version of the training;
A website listing service providers who specialise in helping associations make the digital transition and providing a place for associations to help each other and share their needs;
A major communications campaign to encourage associations to recognise the contradiction of trying to change the world using the tools of capitalism.
It’s been a busy year: the first 3 actions detailed above have now been completed! We’ll tell you all about them in the rest of this article.
Training suppliers of ethical digital services to support associations
We’ve come to the conclusion that there are very few ethical digital service providers offering solutions that really take into account the needs of voluntary organisations, and in particular the support required to make a successful transition to open source digital tools. The first stage of the Emancip’Asso project therefore aims to support the development of the skills of these actors through two mechanisms: training and an online course (MOOC).
A much-appreciated training course in January 2023
20 people met in Paris from 16 to 20 January at the premises of the FPH (Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humanity) to take part in the training course “Developing a range of services to support associations in their ethical digital transition” (in French). Although the original training programme (in French) had to be slightly modified as Thursday 19 January was a day of action against the pension reform, all presentations were able to take place during the week.
Once again, we would like to thank the 9 people who agreed to take part in this training session to share their expertise and exchange views with the participants. Their contributions were much appreciated (see below) and proved invaluable in providing a solid base of knowledge and resources for the production of the MOOC.
We would also like to thank the 20 people who attended the 7 training sessions and took part in the many informal discussions that took place. Our objective of giving priority to alternative hosts who are members of the Collectif des Hébergeurs Alternatifs Transparents Ouverts Neutres et Solidaires (CHATONS) was achieved, as 70% of the participants are active within an organisation that is a member of the CHATONS collective (14 people), representing a total of 11 structures that are members of the CHATONS collective (Alolise, Assodev-Marsnet, le Cloud Girofle, la Contre-Voie, Deuxfleurs, Immae. eu, Libretic, Nebulae, Pâquerette, Picasoft and Sleto). Of the 6 other participants, one has seen his organisation (FuturEtic) join the CHATONS collective in June 2023 and another (Krashboyz Bordel Klub) is currently applying to join.
The satisfaction questionnaire we sent out to participants highlights the fact that, overall, the week was beneficial for everyone. For example, 35% of participants found the training very satisfactory, 60% fairly satisfactory and only one participant found the training fairly unsatisfactory.
The most popular teaching sequences were:
Carry out a digital diagnosis of an association
Developing your network and thinking about complementary work
Communicating and designing a service offer
User training and support/assistance
An overview of the digital uses of associations
Understand the non-profit sector
Establish a strategic dialogue with the association
(Satisfaction rate calculated on the basis of 5 criteria: quality of theoretical content, quality of practical content, quality of teaching approach, quality of facilitation tools and listening ability/availability).
We also asked participants how satisfied they were with other aspects of the training. And as the graph below shows, overall satisfaction was high, with a few rare exceptions.
However, we recognise that certain aspects could be improved:
encourage less top-down methods of knowledge transfer,
providing more practical work and exchange of practice
improving the coherence between the different interventions
using more appropriate premises.
And we’ll do our best if we decide to run the course again in the future. But at the moment we don’t have the funding to do so.
A full MOOC in December 2023
It took us almost a year to turn the training into a MOOC, but that’s it: the online course “Developing a range of services to support voluntary organisations in their ethical digital transition” is now available on the CHATONS MOOC platform (only in French, sorry!). Mind you, the paint is still fresh and there are bound to be a few typos, but this online course, which is primarily aimed at organisations and individuals who already provide online services or who want to offer them to associations, will enable you to acquire a methodology and support techniques that go far beyond simply providing services.
The CHATONS #2 MOOC is broadly based on the educational sequence of the training course and allows you to navigate as you wish within 8 major themes, each of which offers several lessons and an MCQ (for self-assessment of acquired knowledge). Each lesson is structured around illustrated textual content and sometimes includes activities for you to complete. While we do not aim to be exhaustive, we have tried to summarise the state of knowledge on each topic and systematically include a ‘further reading’ section so that anyone wishing to delve deeper into the subject can consult additional resources.
The course is now open and anyone can join whenever they like: there’s no registration period to keep to. In fact, you don’t even need to register to view the lessons. However, we recommend that you create an account to take advantage of advanced features:
Access to self-assessment exercises in the form of multiple choice questions;
Access to the self-help forum
Track your progress through the course (so you can pick up a lesson where you left off, or keep track of your assessment results).
The key word here is autonomy. We want to give learners as much freedom as possible in their learning path: everyone can follow the lessons at their own pace and manage the time they devote to this MOOC.
As usual with Framasoft, all content created for this MOOC is released under a free CC-By-SA licence (some images and videos from third party sites are marked as such). We hope that it will evolve, especially thanks to the contributions and feedback on the support forum. This MOOC should therefore be seen as an organic, living community: it will grow if we take care of it. If there are missing resources, if an activity is off the mark, if a lesson is too long, we invite you to share your opinion and suggest improvements on the support forum.
A website to help associations get in touch with service providers, but that’s not all…
The first objective of the Emancip’Asso project was to enable ethical online service providers to develop their skills in supporting associations, but the second was to create an online space where associations could identify them. That’s why, right from the start of the project, we planned to create a website to bring people together. But before we could start creating the site, we had to create a graphic identity for Emancip’Asso.
A graphic identity and design 👌
In September 2022, we asked a group of students to work on the creation of the graphic charter and visual identity for the Emancip’Asso project, as part of the supervised projects within the Colibre pro degree. After an initial phase in which the project was presented and our brief explained, 4 students⋅es carried out a comparison of the graphic charters/visual identities of ‘neighbouring’ projects before drawing up a set of specifications presenting their analysis of the needs, from which they each developed a proposal for the graphic charter. One of these proposals met our expectations and served as the inspiration for our service provider, Thomas Nicolas (thanks to him), to create the logo.
At the same time, we responded to a call for projects from the Latitudes association, which each year offers to help organisations with a committed digital project to bring it to fruition through a tutoring programme with students from their partner schools. Between October 2022 and January 2023, three second-year students from the CentraleSupélec engineering school worked on a prototype of the future website. After learning about the project, they thought about the tree structure of the future website and the functionalities to be offered on each page, before creating mock-ups using the Penpot tool. These mock-ups were then used by our service provider, the Coopérative des Internets, to build the site.
The graphic identity and design of emancipasso.org is the result of the work of many people, and we’re pretty damn proud of it.
A directory of service providers, a community and resources
The emancipasso.org website, created by La Coopérative des Internets (thanks to them!), is divided into 3 sections.
The first is a directory of service providers able to support associations wishing to make the transition to open source digital tools.
By “support”, we mean accompanying the association through all the stages necessary for its transition (co-development of a digital strategy, diagnosis and recommendations, implementation of these recommendations and assistance in getting to grips with the solutions deployed). We found that associations often had difficulty finding professionals who could provide this type of tailored support. Like many organisations, not-for-profits think in terms of ‘tools’ first, before thinking about a digital strategy to ensure a smooth transition (without having to return to the services of the web giants after a few months because they haven’t thought through all the aspects of this transition). For this reason, associations will not find in this directory providers who only offer technical solutions. In fact, we have systematically asked service providers who have volunteered to be included in this directory to prove that they have already carried out several projects to support associations.
Click to support us and help Shane, Émancip’Asso mascot – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
So far, 20 service providers are listed in this directory. That’s a start. Over the past month, we have been actively communicating with support professionals about the existence of this site. What’s more, we’re expecting service providers who have taken the training or the MOOC to register in the next few months. So it’s still a work in progress and you can access it. If you know of people or organisations that could be listed, please let us know.
The emancipasso.org website is also intended to be a gateway to a community where associations and other players in the emancipatory digital ecosystem can help and advise each other, share best practices and communicate their needs in terms of tools and/or functionalities so that development costs can be shared between several organisations. Based on the observation that associations, and in particular the people in charge of the digital aspects within them, currently have very few forums in which to discuss their practices in relation to the digital transition (thanks, incidentally, to the Mouvement Associatif and its regional delegations, which regularly address this issue), we felt it was essential to offer a space where they could feel less isolated on these issues.
Finally, the Resources section offers a selection of content aimed at voluntary organisations, so that they can familiarise themselves with ethical digital technology, but also at service providers, so that they can improve their knowledge of the voluntary sector and their methods of support. Our aim here is to list as much educational content as possible to promote the emancipation of the voluntary sector. If you have resources that we have not identified, please let us know (by sending a message to contact(at)emancipasso(dot)org) so that we can add them.
We will also continue to invite service providers to join the Emancip’Asso directory and to process applications. It’s a long-term task to identify all the existing structures and ensure that they really offer services to associations that include a support dimension. Throughout the year, we will try to be present at the main gatherings of ethical and responsible digital professionals to inform them about the scheme and encourage them to join.
Thanks to your donations, Shane is not afraid to fight Toxicloud. – Illustration CC-By David Revoy
But the biggest task will be to carry out the fourth stage of the project: to make associations aware of the incoherence of trying to change the world using the tools of capitalism and to encourage them to go to emancipasso.org to find resources, peer support and service providers to help them in their transition. To do this, we plan to launch a targeted communications campaign throughout March 2024. We are currently working on this and hope you will help us by sharing our communication materials with your favourite associations! And throughout the year, we will be presenting the project at the main events that bring together the voluntary sector (Forum national de l’ESS, Universités d’été du Mouvement Associatif, Forum national des associations, etc.) to raise awareness.
Finally, once the associations are aware of the project and have joined the Emancip’Asso community, we will put more energy into animating this community in order to facilitate exchanges between participants. Our goal is for the Emancip’Asso community to become an essential space for all associations in transition or that have completed their digital transition, and for frequent visits to this community to become an integral part of associative practices.
Thank you for supporting Emancip’Asso and Framasoft
Although the costs of the Emancip’Asso project have so far been covered by the Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer pour le Progrès de l’Homme (FPH), the Fondation Crédit Coopératif and the Fondation Un monde par tous, we no longer have any external sources of funding for the rest of the project.
So if you like this project and if it’s possible for you, we encourage you to support Framasoft. A part of your donations will help us to finance the costs (communication campaign and project coordination) of the Emancip’Asso project in 2024.
Once again this year, we need you, your support, your sharing to help us regain ground on the toxic GAFAM web and multiply the number of ethical digital spaces.
So we’ve asked David Revoy to help us present this on our « Support Framasoft » page, which we invite you to visit (because it’s beautiful) and above all to share as widely as possible :
If we are to balance our budget for 2024, we have just 12 days left to raise € 109000: we can’t do it without your help !
Soon
