Hehe, are you recruiting? I saw you were based at La Reunion!
It’s very good you found your way around here. I have thought about contacting you but indeed time flew by and I forgot. I have looked into Communecter and what you’ve been doing with Les Pixels Humains extensively and share your vision that it would be extremely productive and creative to meet up. I think there are two ways to go:
- one is to work on the cartographic part of our PUBLIC project.
- another is to collaborate on Incommon.
Have a look at Migrators as well…
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In the Meantime: Software Freedom in the ‘Cloud’
The 
FSFE has set up a Discourse – linked to from the Migrators group page above – to support the PMPC campaign and experiment on their own with the software I use and love. Björn Schießle, FSFE coordinator for Germany linked a interesting article he wrote last November on Free Software in the Cloud where he explores the meaning of software freedom when software is run remotely, eventually in a handful of data-centres serving “federated instances”… Here is a copy of the response I made there:
I very much agree with your vision. Indeed AGPLv3 is key here, but there are some issues still verifying the source code and the code running in the browser are the same. Even on Operating Systems, reproducible builds are still a work in progress. Promoting good software using AGPLv3 is a great start, ensuring users can verify code integrity follows, but in this regard, attempts at doing it require developer participation: LibreJS for example is not able yet to recognize much code, and will complain that code that is under the GPL may be non-free, pushing the burden on the developers to prove themselves beyond declaring their software free! In this condition, adoption of LibreJS appears seldom possible on a large scale.
Control, people need to stay in control of their data and need to be able to export/import them in order to move.
Of course! But in this domain as well, we lack proper understanding of what is possible and useful. For one, if “your data” is exportable from an instance and importable into another, are you able to keep the links to other people’s contributions that make the real riches of “your data”? Are you able to forward the URIs communicated in the wild via HTTP 301? All these “data” are beyond “your” control, that’s why we need to think beyond data ownership into public digital infrastructure so that data portability is not an issue and who controls the Web is not an issue. What you do on the Web should not be affected by where you do it, but it actually is. Is that fixable? Is that desirable to fix it? All this complexity is not addressed yet.
