Forming a Lobby,
the EU Digital Services Act and Interoperability Law (Joost / nlnet, Sebastian)
FEP (pukkamustard, CJ)
Link relations (Sebastian, rhiaro)
EU and Interoperability Law
Following up the discussion on mastodon, we need to discuss about EU-supported ActivityPub outreach and funding taking over the OTF that was defunded by Trump. See this long thread … German Article
We need a lobby and some invited policy advocates, experts and NGOs to the meeting
A message from Vittorio Bertola (who spoke at IGF on interoperability) whom I invited and is planning to attend:
Hello Derek,
thanks for reaching out and apologies for the late reply, and yes, unfortunately my Mastodon account is quite dead, because of limited time and of network effects that we hope to eliminate through open interoperability
It’s good if more people from the pro-openness community want to join efforts. I will be happy to join the meeting, I need to move a thing but should be able to do it.
By the way, I’d like to put together an informal group of “open messaging” SMEs, especially from Europe. The Commission is very sensitive to requests from businesses, more than to requests coming from civil society and “digital activists”, so it makes sense to repackage common requests as coming from companies. If there is any company in the Fediverse space that could fit that description, it would be good to get in touch.
Ciao,
–
Vittorio Bertola
Head of Policy & Innovation
Open-Xchange
The Commission is very sensitive to requests from businesses
Exactly this a very important point.
A second point regarding the Digital Services Act:
Yet the Commission is nearly only exposed to businesses.
it makes sense to repackage common requests as coming from companies
Sure, officially.
But we need to tackle the second point as well, et. al
( EVERYBODY ) write a short message to your favourite MEP and demand compulsory Interoperability !
Can we move FEP to a separate, dedicated meeting? I don’t want to distract from the work y’all are doing on the #1 item on the agenda, which if it went like last week’s meeting will take a significant (whole?) time, especially with the possibly-expanded list of attendees this time around.
Just want clarify around when FEP will realistically be an agenda item so I can attend the meeting (I can’t attend every single one).
Apologies for missing some names or details, my network was dropping out.
The main takeaway was that we’d like to find a better venue under which to organise than the SocialCG - please make suggestions - ideally people who are already doing lobbying/campaigning/activism in Brussels, because the structures and timings are very complex and inside knowledge is necessary to be effective.
If folks could list the other organisations already working on related campaigning here, that would be really helpful. Several were mentioned and I didn’t catch them all. I think it’d be important to follow up with these orgs, find out how to join their meetings, and look at what work the are already doing that we could support or lend expertise to, rather than starting things from scratch ourselves.
List organisations we already know about who are working adjacent to digital rights and EU policy.
Find out when their meetings are and how to join them, and where any async discussions take place.
Get involved, as individuals, in those: find out what their current understand of the interoperability mandate work is, and make sure they’re aware of the current state of fediverse (etc) technologies. Offer to provide them with technical advice and support for any aligned campaigning they are doing within the EU.
Report back those efforts to the SocialCG, and request support from others in the CG if necessary - but don’t make this a thing that is centralised around the SocialCG as a starting point for the action. We really don’t want to be duplicating effort that is happening elsewhere, and by people who are better informed about the political side of things.
cwebber2: … so the important thing is we push for an interoperable protocol but rather than a specific protocol
The topic was to create a lobby, but in the context of an activitypub meeting. Given what @cwebber said above we might give it an official, more generic name. How about The Fediverse Lobby?
Some additional thoughts and remarks:
We might define a set of hashtags to be used in our toots and tweets to relate to all this.
We might have a separate forum category here for the lobby-related stuffz (@how).
I tooted an idea to represent fediverse more as a unified whole, more understandable + ‘grander’-seeming to legislators.
In mobilizing-the-fedi efforts we might collect our toots in a wiki post, and cross-boost (here’s my HTC announcement toot).
) write a short message to your favourite MEP and demand compulsory Interoperability !
http only link:
