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Archive for December, 2015

European Libre Christmas Raffle

Thursday, December 17th, 2015

Win a Samsung Galaxy S2 with Replicant OS

Just answer the following question until Sunday 20151220 6PM CEST: What was #Coreboot initially be called and what would have been missing in that name according to #RMS

The winner will be drawn from all correct answers on Sunday. To answer, you could simply send me an email : mmoeller at fsfe.org

UpdateThe raffle is over and the winner is set. Thanks all for taking part.

Freedomvote – a Summary

Tuesday, December 15th, 2015

This year in October elections happened in Switzerland. In order to offer citizens a way to learn more about the politicians opinion on Free Software, Open Data and digital rights, we have set up a platform called Freedomvote. We got in touch with representatives of the political parties and invited them to let their candidates answer 10 selected questions. About 100 politicians from all well known parties took part.

Everyone have had the chance to compare their own opinion with the ones of the politicians and this feature has widely been used. We have also added a nice Spider Graph feature to make that even easier.

The overall feedback was very positive and we had some good reflections in the press as well (Netzpolitik.org, Computerworld, PCtipp …).

We have noticed reservations regarding Open Government Data, so we asked some of the candidates and the reply was that they have concerns about costs and the additional work Open Data might cause. We have been discussing this with the Swiss Opendata Team and have been able to set up some further discussions with those candidates so hopefully their position might shift a bit in the future.

We have been a bit surprised to see, that members of the Liberals did cover the least of our claims. We have expected that from the politically right parties, but not from the Liberals. Maybe the reason is that the Swiss Liberals mainly have commercial interests and less social ones.

The software that we have created for Freedomvote is available under a GPLv3 License and will hopefully be re-used for other upcoming elections.