FSFE wins EU Datathon +++ YH4F winners and new round +++ No to chat control

FSFE’s ‘TEDective’, a program helping to analyse public spending, wins first prize in the EU Datathon and our very own Youth Hacking 4 Freedom contest starts again. An EU draft law might end secure chats. Citizens in Sweden have a say with the Free Software Decidim and the FSFE Switzerland asks administrations to join federated social media.

FSFE’s open data app TEDective wins EU Datathon

The FSFE’s proposal ‘TEDective’ won the first prize in ‘transparency in public procurement’ challenge in the EU Datathon – the European open data competition. TEDective works with public EU tendering data. The prototype program helps us analyse how public administrations in the European Union spend their money. For example, it allows journalists to find out how much money the government spends on Microsoft licenses and products, but also it helps to compare that spending with other regions in similar cases or even in relation to other countries. Are you a data expert who wants to help? Email tedective@fsfe.org.

YH4F winners!

After a year of coding and evaluation, the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom competition came to an end, giving us amazing projects. Over a hundred people coming from 25 countries registered for the competition, making it a truly pan-European event. The six winning programs offer sign language transcription, a smart table robot, a personal assistant, a music tutorial, file sharing, and a homework manager. All Free Software.

Do you want to get to know some of the participants and their motivation? Check our interview! Alexia, Ekaterina, and Miquel introduce themselves.

YH4F competition starts again!

The registration for the second edition of “Youth Hacking 4 Freedom”, the FSFE’s hacking competition for teenagers from all over Europe, just started. This contest offers young people aged between 14 and 18 the opportunity to challenge themselves, meet like-minded people, and win cash prizes. Register until 31 December 2022 and share the opportunity with schools and young hackers!

EU draft law might end secure chats

The European Commission proposed a directive on mandatory chat control with the supposed aim to effectively tackle child sexual abuse. If the law is enforced, Internet service providers will have to monitor and scan all communications of citizens – including the securely encrypted end-to-end ones. It is a threat to all our private communication. On top of that, it is only big market players who can carry out this enforced necessity to scan every single message. It would hinder Free Software developers from writing and running their own versions of communication software, and may deprive us of open standard programming interfaces.

Podcast: Citizens participate in local administrations

Now it is easier than ever for a municipality to ask its citizens what building projects to prioritise, how to distribute a given budget, or other questions. In our latest Software Freedom Podcast, Petter Joelson, director of the Swedish NGO Digidem Lab, explains the power of the participation platform “Decidim” based on its implementation in Sweden. With Decidim, municipalities can design citizen processes in a modular way to fit their needs.

Swedish administrations use participatory budgets – budgets in which citizens participate. Citizens submit proposals and the administration examines whether the proposal is legal and feasible. Then, citizens vote on the approved proposals. With Decidim the process and the time taken to implement the project can be monitored by everyone and it is possible to check if something is not going according to plan. The software is designed and suitable for large-scale implementations. Many cities already use Decidim, for example New York, Barcelona, and Helsinki.

Fedigov: FSFE Switzerland asks administrations to join Mastodon

When public institutions share a message on social media they should not limit it to proprietary platforms. To effectively communicate with all citizens, including those who are rightfully concerned about their privacy, administrations should also use federated social media. The FSFE Switzerland and the GNU/Linux.ch explain this to local authorities. The Fedigov website (also available in DE, FR, IT) shows that ethical communication benefits the public sector. You can use the letter template and send a letter to your local authorities asking them to join Mastodon, Pixelfeld, and Peertube.

Save the date!

• On Thursday 17 November Lina Ceballos, REUSE coordinator, will give a talk about REUSE and show the participants how indicating licensing and copyright information can be easier. Right after, Lina will give the GNUHealth project the well-deserved REUSE compliance award for its Hospital Management System component. The talk is part of GHCon and takes place in person in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.
• On Monday 21 November, we are giving an Upcycling Android workshop at the Umweltbundesamt in Dessau, Germany. The workshop includes an intro to F-Droid and microG. Register to attend!
• On Saturday 26 November we are organising a booth and a talk at Campus du Libre in Lyon, France. Vincent Lequertier gives a talk ‘For an inclusive and ethical artificial intelligence’. Just drop by!

Past events

• On 11 November we organised the Legal Education Day, presented four talks, and held a booth at SFSCon in Bolzano, Italy.
• On 2 November we gave an Upcycling Android workshop in Hamburg, Germany, with an intro to F-Droid and microG.
• On 29 October Free Software and GNU/Linux enthusiasts met in Minsk, Belarus.
• On 28 October the General Assembly of the FSFE took place in Arnhem, Netherlands.

FSFE groups

Belarus: The FSFE Minsk group and GNU/Linux enthusiasts met in Minsk. It the first in person meeting after a long period of only virtual communications. Several topics regarding using and creating Free Software were discussed. Some of them were Intel TDX confidential computing, Lustre project state, Kubernetes clusters, OpenStreetMap, and Pine Phone user experience. The event finished with all the participants enjoying a barbecue.

Germany: Ana Galan, FSFE’s Senior Project Manager Communications, joined Berlin’s group October meeting. The group also organised a booth in FifFkon, and talked in the online monthly edu meeting about the OpenTalk videoconferencing tool. The Hamburg group meets monthly.

Italy: The FSFE celebrated Linux Day on 22 October in Milan. Marta Andreoli, Deputy Coordinator Italy, gave an overview of Free Software associations in Italy, Natale Vinto presented ‘Public Money? Public Code!’, and Stefano Costa talked about Router Freedom in Italy and EU.

Netherlands: Router Freedom consultation in Belgium is announced and the Netherlands group is working on formulating a stance on this and translating it to Dutch. The group met the FSFE team in Arnhem, where the FSFE had its general assembly. The group also discussed the exodus of developers leaving GitHub for codeberg.org and git.sr.ht because of Copilot.

Switzerland: Volunteers in Switzerland, including the local groups Basel and Zurich, launch the Fedigov campaign. After the recent developments on Twitter, now it is the right time to bring public communication onto the Fediverse. All local groups can join the Fedigov campaign! The code of the website is available, any group can fork and adapt it. And the FSFE Switzerland can help this initiative in other countries.

Women: In October’s online meeting, the group discussed calendar systems for websites and proposed to create an introduction of the members in the form of a game.

Contribute to our Newsletter

If you would like to share any thoughts, pictures, or news, please send them to us. As always, the address is newsletter@fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you! If you also want to support us and our work, join our community and support us with a donation or a monthly contribution. Thanks to our community and all the volunteers, supporters, and donors who make our work possible. And thanks to our translators, who enable you to read this newsletter in your native languages.

Your editor, Fani Partsafyllidou

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Let’s talk with young hackers Ekaterina, Miquel and Alexia about YH4F

The first edition of the Youth Hacking for Freedom contest has ended. After 5 months of coding, over 35 young people came up with outstanding projects. Three of them will be introduced to you in this interview. Ekaterina, the mind behind Music Companion, Miquel who developed Smart Table Assistant and Alexia, the creator of a basic password manager.

The Youth Hacking 4 Freedom contest, is a competition organised by the FSFE that encourages young Europeans to start working on their personal technical project. As there are no limits to the possibilities of projects that could be submitted and every technical idea is welcome, the first edition ended up with a great number of diverse and inspiring projects, making it really hard for the jury members to choose the six winners.With all those well done projects we thought about a way how to best highlight the effort and work that was put into them. Hence, we are happy to present three of the contestants.

Ekaterina is 16 years old and currently living in the Republic of Cyprus. She has written her first program for the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom competition, Music Companion. Next, we have Miquel, who is from Spain and 17 years old. Miquel has worked on his Smart Table Assistant and had some experience with programming and tinkering before joining the competition. He is studying Industrial Engineering and is passionate about new technologies, entrepreneurship and discovering new things. His goal is to help our society by developing projects in the Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field. Last but not least, we are happy to introduce Alexia, who is living in Bucharest, Romania. Alexia also had some contact with programming before the competition and is enrolled in a technical school.

FSFE: Hello Ekaterina, Miquel and Alexia. Thank you for joining us for this interview.

FSFE: Before we start learning about your different projects, we would like to know a bit more about your technical background and how you started learning to program.

Alexia: The first programming language I was ever introduced to was C++. It was taught to me in my last year of primary school. I never enjoyed it as much as my classmates, but it enabled me to learn other languages such as Python and SQL which are more applicable in my everyday projects. I was lucky enough to have very passionate and supportive teachers throughout my school years. They taught me all the difficult principles of programming and always referred me to the best materials. I was indeed very fortunate in this regard.

Ekaterina: My first contact with programming was during my Computer Science GCSE which is when we started learning some basic programming concepts and coding in VisualBasic. Later in my Computer Science A-Level we started learning Python, which was when I started to learn programming by myself using SoloLearn and Stackoverflow.

Miquel:My first contact with programming was when I was about 12 years old with C++ and Arduino. I was already interested before, but I wasn't very good at the subject. I signed up for an introductory course for a few months and then started a self-learning process. I love being able to make what I imagine to come true, and through programming, 3d printing, 3d design and the desire to learn, some things are possible.

FSFE: Miquel, you have worked with hardware and have also submitted a hardware project. What was the first hardware project you worked on? How and why did you start making new devices?

Miquel: Honestly, no one in my family is professionally engaged in any field of technology or programming, but we have always been very interested in it. Since I was little, I have accompanied my brother and my parents on their little projects and our house construction. I like to work and have challenges. When I began to get more into the field of programming and robotics, my brain clicked. Since then I have had ups and downs in motivation, but I continue to undertake new projects.

FSFE: How and why did you decide to join YH4F? And what did you like the most about the contest?

Ekaterina: It felt like a big challenge. When I heard about the competition from my teacher I was very scared to even sign up. I did not have enough knowledge at that time to write something more complex than "if this condition is true, then output this" and so on. But five months seemed enough for me to learn programming and to write a program. As I was expecting, I would rush towards the end to finish the program, and when 1 week before the program was due I received an email from Alexander Sander saying "Don't worry, it's fine if you did not finish it yet. Send it anyway". It calmed me down so much that I actually finished it and submitted a few days earlier. The support was really necessary and I enjoyed it.

Alexia: I remember seeing a poster with details about the contest just outside the Computer Lab. My teacher encouraged me to participate, so I decided to join it and challenge myself. I decided to make something that would include a GUI since I never get the chance to implement it to the code I usually write.

I think the best thing about YH4F is that it promotes Free Software alternatives to people who haven’t had the chance to realize the benefits of such projects. I use Free Software software pretty frequently, especially when it comes to operating systems.

Miquel: I remember I was online with a friend, I think it was on Twitter, when I found an announcement of a free software contest. I got interested, and I looked at the information about how to participate. After a long time, when there were relatively few days left to finish the registration period for the contest, my friend reminded me to register. I told my parents and finally signed up.

This contest for me is a real wonder. I think that giving young people the opportunity to show others what they have thought, created and suffered doing is very nice. I have been very comfortable throughout the process, the mentors have been very kind and understood all the effort. It is a pleasure to share this experience with others who are interested in it.

FSFE: How did you came up with your project idea? What motivated you to do your project?

Alexia:I have a lot of close friends who think the Internet is like an endless playground where you’re anonymous and untouchable. Many of them suffered extremely painful consequences as a result of this. Even if we’re talking about stealing passwords or other types of sensitive data left unprotected, this type of negligence often brings the worst with it.

I remember wanting to make a tool with the purpose of raising awareness to the dangers of unprotected data. Or at least try taking an initiative. I thought that I could make an impact in my inner circle and inspire others to come up with similar ideas.

Ekaterina: Music has been a part of my life for about 10 years, so the idea came up kind of automatically. At first I thought about making it as a game, however later on I realized that some people wouldn't have enough knowledge about music to play it. This is how it became a small "glossary" about music.

FSFE: And what motivated you to carry out your project?

Ekaterina: Simply participating in this competition gave me motivation to realize it. I wanted to get to know programming more and try myself. The competition not only gave me knowledge on how to code in python, but also the experience of learning on the go and facing such challenges by myself. Music Companion is not a very complex app but at the same time a very educational one and I am happy that after conducting the knowledge I had about programming it turned out this awesome.

FSFE: And Miquel, how did you came up with your idea for the “Smart Table Assistant”?

Miquel:I have always wanted to be able to invent a product that helps society. Just before the registration period for the youth hacking contest my mother suffered immobility. I saw that she had some difficulty doing some tasks and I thought that a smart table would be a great idea to help her. The Smart Table Assistant is intended for those people who are affected by paraplegia. Paraplegia is a disease that immobilizes the legs and trunk, but not the arms. With this smart table, you can get to customize the furniture to help people with certain pathologies. I saw that with the opportunity of the competition I could motivate myself to develop a project of this scale and thus totally improve my knowledge.

FSFE: Ekaterina your project “Music Companion” has also won a prize at the competition. Do you think it is important for people to understand the basic of music?

Ekaterina: Yes, I think it is. For today I haven't met people who haven't somehow interacted with music or a musical instrument. But the number of students in music schools is slowly decreasing and this worries me a little bit. I believe music, especially classical, should be learnt and understood by people nowadays rather than ignored or considered old-fashioned.

FSFE: Did some of you encounter any problems during the coding period or the building period?

Miquel: Of course, in a project of this size, it is very easy to encounter obstacles along the way. I think the hardest part was at the beginning. It was difficult for me to start and organize all the ideas to be able to create something unique, innovative and efficient. The whole first period of analysing and acquiring knowledge was cumbersome but motivating. From the moment I started practising, I began to feel that excitement of the beginning of a very long journey. Also, in the programming, I found some obstacles but I got away with it. I also really enjoyed the design but I needed some help with the assembling of the robot.

I had some inspiration for the aesthetics of the product by the Sagrada Familia which is an emblematic basilica in Barcelona. With this, I was able to direct the design and thus, know what functionalities to be able to adapt in that aesthetics so that I could keep all the utilities of the robot thought in the beginning.

Ekaterina:Yes, I faced many problems. I think at least 5 times I said to myself "No, I am giving up, I don't know how to program". It was really stressful at first as I was only surfing around Youtube tutorials for about 2 months and only then I started programming. Many times the code wasn't running simply because one symbol or space was missing. And worth mentioning is that I was learning on the go as before I have never faced such complex tasks.

Alexia:I definitely encountered a lot of technical issues, and it really didn’t help that it was my first “major” project. I’ve never worked with interfaces before, so this was especially hard. I had no idea how to properly make the design, so pretty much all the effort was put into that. Thinking about it, I definitely over-prioritized it. Database management was even more frustrating as I had almost no structure and generally did things without fully thinking them through. In the end, I ended up putting more hours into debugging than actually writing the code. Nevertheless, I’m grateful for the experience that came along with all the hardship.

FSFE: Do you think you will continue working on your project and what would be some next steps you would like to carry out?

Miquel: I like being asked that. Referring to the Smart Table Assistant, I have improvements in mind and I'm sure there are still many more, but I also have other projects in mind. Just recently I had an idea of ​a device that would help rehabilitation or just massage people. These massages will be complemented with aromatic treatments and the setting of lights. This device would also be for domestic use and I would like to be able to make its aesthetics even more beautiful than this project (S.T.A). With more industrial and improved materials.

Alexia: I’m thinking of resuming the project at some point, along with my original initiative. The next step will definitely be encrypting the database itself, since without that the application isn’t really that functional. I’m also thinking of improving the interface, and maybe even switching to a better language (I’ve been using Python, but to be honest I haven’t been that satisfied with the end result). Either way, I’m happy that I went along with it, even if for now It’s left unfinished.

Ekaterina: I think I will try to implement a library for sounds and perhaps increase the number of possible notes that could be heard, scales and chords. However I really want to leave it as it is to remember it as my first ever written program.

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The coding contest Youth Hacking 4 Freedom launches its second edition

The registration for the second edition of “Youth Hacking 4 Freedom ", the FSFE’s hacking competition for teenagers from all over Europe, has started. This contest offers young people aged between 14 and 18 the opportunity to challenge themselves, meet like-minded people and win cash prizes.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), a European charity that empowers users to control technology, is launching the second edition of its coding competition ‘Youth Hacking 4 Freedom' (YH4F). Registration is open until 31 December, after which the six-month coding phase will start and last until the end of June 2023.

YH4F aims to inspire the younger generation by giving them the chance to hack on a software project in a fair and fun way while meeting other young developers from all around Europe. The winners will receive a cash prize and a two-day trip to Brussels with other hackers for the award ceremony.

The first edition of the competition was a huge success with wide participation and well-coded winning projects. Over a hundred people coming from 25 different countries registered for the competition and, after a five-month coding phase, 35 projects were submitted. The six winning projects offer sign language transcription , a smart table robot , a personal assistant, a music tutorial, a file sharing program, and a homework manager. All programs are licensed under Free Software licenses, which grants everybody the right to use, understand, share, and improve them.

“Taking part in this competition was personally a big step as before it I have never ever programmed something and I did not have knowledge to do so. During the project I learned a lot more about programming concepts, how can I implement the modules and generally the programming language Python", explains Ekaterina, one of the winners of the first edition of the YH4F competition.

To join the second edition of the YH4F competition, participants must be between 14 and 18 years old and live in a European country. The YH4F competition includes an online kick-off event in which the FSFE team will present the competition and answer questions about it. Participants may bring all their imagination to the competition as any type of software can be coded as long as it is Free Software. Therefore, the software project can be a stand-alone program written from scratch, or a modification and combination of existing programs. Everything is welcome! Moreover, the participants will have the chance to follow each other’s work and exchange ideas.

After six months of coding, from the beginning of January until the end of June, the participants will submit their projects to be evaluated by an independent experts jury.

• Participants must be 14-18 years old and should register at yh4f.org
• Registration will be open until 31 December 2022
• The coding period will be from 1 January 2023 to 30 June 2023.
• Six winners will be awarded cash prizes (4096€, 2048€, and 1024€) and a trip to Brussels.
• The competition will take place online. The Award Ceremony will be in Brussels.

The YH4F is made possible thanks to the kind financial support of Reinhard Wiesemann, Linuxhotel, and Vielrespektzentrum.

At the website yh4f.org you can find all related information, such as the process, the eligibility criteria, and FAQs. You can also use the illustrations in our dedicated media package when sharing the news of the competition.

About the Free Software Foundation Europe

The Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to control technology. Software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives, and it is important that this technology empowers rather than restricts us. Free Software gives everybody the rights to use, understand, improve, and share software. These rights help support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press, and privacy.

The FSFE helps individuals and organisations to understand how Free Software contributes to freedom, transparency, and self-determination. It enhances users' rights by abolishing barriers to Free Software adoption, encouraging people to use and develop Free Software, and providing resources to enable everyone to further promote Free Software in Europe.

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SFP#17: Citizen participation through Free Software with Petter Joelson

In this 17th episode of the Software Freedom Podcast Matthias Kirschner and Petter Joelson uncover how Free Software can be a tool for citizens to actively participate in their local community. Petter invites you into the world of Decidem and explains what citizen participation should look like.

Petter Joelson is the director of Digidem Lab, a Swedish NGO that works on improving citizen participation according to the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development. One of the tools they promote and work with is the Free Software participation platform Decidim. Decidim was originally developed by the city of Barcelona and is today widely used. With this episode the Software Freedom Podcast invites its listeners to dive into the world of citizen participation, how it could be done, what hurdles are on the way, and – in line with our "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign – how publicly financed software can help administrations across Europe.

Read more:

• "Public Money? Public Code!"
• Digidem Lab
• Decidim

If you liked this episode and want to support our continuous work for software freedom, please help us with a donation.

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If enforced, EU chat control will limit Free Software

Surely you have already heard about the controversial EU draft law on mandatory chat control with the supposed aim to effectively tackle child sexual abuse. This law implies the monitoring and scanning of the communications of citizens – even the securely encrypted end-to-end one.

FSFS’s co-founder and programmer Bernhard E. Reiter explains why we as Free Software supporters should join the protest against this legislation that deprives citizens of the privacy of digital correspondence.

As a software developer, if I needed a method to transfer data to a group of people, I would write an application to encode and decode any information/ message I want to send over this channel. Then I would distribute the app to my users, using it to communicate with them, without anybody being able to see what we write along the way.

This is so-called end-to-end cryptography, and any software engineer can write such an application.

Free Software allows everyone to control, write and run their own software. This means that they can tinker with their devices, they can help each other and even earn money by establishing a business based on this software. They are encouraged to use, understand, share and improve it.

By enforcing all service providers to “scan” chat or other messages, the state must also take away the ability - and the right - for you and me to write own version of software that communicates via the service providers. Otherwise a scan on the server would be useless.

The European Commission’s proposed directive has not fully taken this into account. It would hinder people to run their own Free Software products on their phones (and other devices) and it would limit innovative companies to provide new services based on Free Software components with strong security and privacy-friendly technology.

Furthermore, the intended regulation would raise the bar for entry into a market which is dominated by a few large corporations. Those providers of software and central service have lower costs per message when installing scanning technology and can take this as an excuse not to offer open standard programming interfaces and prevent people from writing their own clients or not to offer a decentralised service infrastructure which is open for fair competition.

This will further burden those aiming to create software for users that is inspectable by the public, as is the case with Free Software. Additionally, the directive will also fail to protect children as intended for the same technical reasons outlined above.

A number of groups and experts have explained other negative effects of the proposed directive, and we are joining them from a technical and ethical Free Software perspective: Please join the protests against the proposed EU Chat control.

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