The OpenForum Europe Capital Series event in Cyprus took place on 16 June and opened by placing open- source at the heart of Europe’s digital future. The opening remarks framed the conference as a bridge between European policy debates and the local Cypriot ecosystem, asking how digital transformation can be guided by public interest, democratic accountability, interoperability, local capacity, and care for the digital commons. A central message emerged early: digital sovereignty is not a slogan, but a practical capacity built through infrastructure, standards, procurement, research, skills, open communities, and public institutions. The event brought together policymakers, researchers, technologists, public-sector actors, civil society, educators, and business representatives, creating a space for dialogue across communities that do not always speak the same language but increasingly depend on one another. Swiss Ambassador Christoph Burgener framed the conference as an important moment for Cyprus, Switzerland, and Europe to reflect on how technological transformation can be shaped in line with democratic values, human dignity, transparency, accountability, and fundamental rights. He highlighted Switzerland’s role as a leading innovation ecosystem and presented science diplomacy as a powerful tool through which smaller countries can contribute far beyond their size. His remarks connected open source with strategic autonomy, trust, cooperation, and public value, referring to the Swiss principle of “public money, public code” as a concrete expression of this commitment. He also emphasized that the digital future will not be built by technology alone, but through shared responsibility, partnerships, and trust. In his keynote, Thibaut Kleiner from DG CONNECT presented open- source as a central pillar of Europe’s technological sovereignty. He argued that open source is no longer a marginal practice, but a fundamental reality of modern software development. Europe already has strong developer communities, open standards, and sectoral expertise, but it must become better organized in order to benefit from them strategically. The EU Open-Source Strategy, placed at the heart of the technological sovereignty package, aims to reduce dependencies, strengthen cloud and AI capabilities, support sustainable communities and foundations, improve cybersecurity, and make public procurement more open source-friendly. Kleiner also emphasized the importance of “public money, public code,” shared repositories, Open-Source Program Offices, and international cooperation, presenting open source not only as a technical model but also as a democratic, economic, and geopolitical opportunity for Europe. The first panel explored open source as a practical response to Europe’s growing technological dependencies, particularly in cloud infrastructure, proprietary software, and public-sector ICT spending. Speakers argued that open-source and open standards are strategic instruments for digital sovereignty, interoperability, resilience, security, and economic value. A recurring theme was that Europe must move from simply using open-source to actively contributing to it. This requires stronger skills development through universities, better support for open-source communities, and a more systematic role for open source in public procurement. Participants also stressed the importance of cultural change within governments and institutions, the role of open-source champions and Open-Source Program Offices, and the opportunity offered by the EU’s technological sovereignty package to turn political ambition into practical capacity. The second panel examined whether European regulation, particularly the Cyber Resilience Act, strengthens digital sovereignty or risks making it harder for European technology actors to build, compete, and innovate. The discussion focused on the practical challenges of implementation, including compliance costs for small and medium-sized enterprises, the readiness of notified bodies, vulnerability reporting obligations, and the still unclear responsibilities of open-source stewards and manufacturers. Speakers emphasized that compliance alone does not equal sovereignty, especially when European data may still depend on foreign cloud providers and external legal jurisdictions. At the same time, the panel highlighted open source, secure-by-design practices, supply-chain due diligence, self-hosting capacity, and European collaboration as essential tools for resilience. Regulation was therefore presented not as an end in itself, but as a test of whether Europe can combine security, openness, innovation, and practical support for those building its digital infrastructure. Leon Schumacher’s keynote offered a complementary perspective by defining digital sovereignty not as nationalism or digital isolation, but as business continuity: the ability to keep operating when a vendor, platform, government, or geopolitical situation changes the rules. Drawing on examples such as the Huawei ban, the weaponisation of financial infrastructure during the war in Ukraine, and Europe’s dependency on US technology platforms, he argued that open source functions as a form of insurance against external control. He also showed how artificial intelligence complicates the traditional meaning of openness, since access to source code alone is no longer enough without model weights, training data, governance, and the ability to inspect, run, adapt, or replace systems independently. Schumacher strongly supported “public money, public code,” especially for strategic public infrastructure such as payments, while warning that major European initiatives such as the digital euro still risk excluding open source innovation and smaller companies. His central message was clear: Europe already has many of the necessary assets, but it must move from strategy to action if open source is to become a real foundation of technological sovereignty. The following panel focused on what open source and digital sovereignty could mean in practice for Cyprus, moving the discussion from European strategy to local capacity and coordination. Speakers highlighted that Cyprus already has many of the necessary ingredients: active open source communities, university libraries and research centres with strong open science experience, high-performance computing and AI infrastructure, technical expertise, and links to European initiatives such as NGI and Open Source Program Offices. At the same time, the panel stressed that these efforts remain scattered and need to be connected through stronger advocacy, government engagement, public-sector adoption, sustainable funding, and collaboration between academia, civil society, SMEs, and open source businesses. The conclusion was that Cyprus does not need to start from scratch; rather, it needs to organize its existing knowledge, infrastructure, and communities into a shared public capability. The “Trust by Design” panel connected Switzerland’s tradition of open innovation with today’s challenges around digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, connectivity, knowledge access, and public trust. Speakers emphasized that trust cannot be added after technology has been built; it must be embedded from the beginning through openness, transparency, governance, security, interoperability, and public accountability. Examples such as SCION, Kiwix, and the Swiss National AI Initiative showed how open source can support resilient networks, offline access to knowledge, trustworthy AI, and more democratic control over critical systems. The discussion also highlighted the need for Cyprus and Europe to create stronger ecosystems in which academia, government, civil society, and industry collaborate around shared infrastructure and shared values. Overall, the panel framed “trust by design” as a practical commitment to building technologies that remain inspectable, inclusive, secure, socially responsible, and aligned with the public interest. The closing remarks brought the event to an end by thanking the Cyprus Institute, OpenForum Europe, the sponsors, partners, moderators, speakers, and participants who made the Cyprus Open Digital Futures Week possible. Rather than simply summarizing the discussions, the speaker emphasized the deeper spirit of the day: the open technology ecosystem has moved beyond asking for attention and is now entering a moment of action, delivery, and responsibility. Themes such as governance, culture, funding, standardisation, cybersecurity, security by design, open source, open standards, and open technology were framed as part of a broader responsibility toward future generations. The central message was that today’s choices will shape tomorrow’s digital landscape, and that openness has now become a mainstream foundation for Europe’s digital and industrial policy. The post OpenForum Europe Capital Series event in Cyprus appeared first on ISOC Switzerland Chapter.

A Genova il weekend del 20 e 21 giugno due giorni di incontri e riflessioni sulle questioni di lingue e di linguaggi. Come CIRCE interverremo nella giornata di domenica sul tema del linguaggio e della tecnologia. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gli incontri saranno ospitati presso la Biblioteca Libertaria Francisco Ferrer (Piazza Embriaci 5/13, Centro Storico) e alla Libera Collina di Castello (Centro Storico) Per conoscere il programma visitare l'agenda condivisa.

Un appuntamento online per esplorare come le cooperative possono costruire modelli di intelligenza artificiale alternativi, democratici e orientati all’interesse collettivo. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Intelligenza artificiale e dati: basta l’etica?”. È con questa domanda, che dà il titolo al prossimo webinar della Fondazione PICO previsto il prossimo 16 giugno alle 14.30, che i componenti del comitato scientifico di PICO sono chiamati a discutere sul ruolo che cooperative, istituzioni e comunità possono avere nella costruzione di modelli di intelligenza artificiale alternativi, più democratici, trasparenti e orientati all’interesse collettivo. Intervengono i componenti del Comitato Scientifico di Fondazione PICO: Enzo Risso (IPSOS), Stefano Tortorici (Scuola Normale Superiore), Antonio Vetrò (Politecnico di Torino, Centro Nexa) e Carlo Milani (eudema.net e circex.org). Modera Francesca Martinelli (Fondazione PICO e Centro Studi Doc). L’iscrizione al webinar è gratuita: è sufficiente compilare l’apposito modulo online. Per saperne di più cliccare qui.

May 12, 2026 — Belval Campus, University of Luxembourg On May 12, I went to Europe at the Crossroads of AI, Power & the Future of Democracy1, an ICTLuxembourg event at the University of Luxembourg’s Belval Campus. Bruce Schneier gave the keynote. He’s a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and a Berkman Klein Fellow, and he’s been writing about technology and governance for decades. The talk drew on “Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship”2; a book he co-authored with Nathan Sanders last fall. I walked out thinking about it for the remainder of the day. AI IS ALREADY INSIDE DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES Schneier’s opening point was blunt: AI is not coming for democracy. It is already there. AI-translated campaign speeches in India’s 2024 elections. Deepfake campaign avatars in South Korea. The French and European parliaments experimenting with AI-drafted legislation. The technology is embedded in how politics actually works, at every level. It propagates messages, drafts regulatory text, and triages compliance documents faster than any human team, even when the output is wrong. He framed this as a spectrum, not a single threat, and that is the part that stuck with me. He walked through use cases that were hard to argue with: AI platforms that transcribe city council meetings and make them searchable. Tools that help citizens draft comments to their legislators. Voting guides in Germany that explain party platforms before elections. These things work today. They lower the barriers to civic participation, which is close to what ISOC has always pushed for. THE CONCENTRATION PROBLEM Then the mood shifted. AI does not distribute power on its own. It amplifies whoever controls it. Schneier put it plainly: the same technology that helps a first-time candidate run for office can flood information environments with synthetic content at industrial scale. Courts, legislatures, and enforcement agencies are already using AI. Brazil’s judiciary is a leading example, and a cautionary one, where productivity gains have outpaced accountability. For those of us in internet governance, the pattern is familiar. The architecture of a technology encodes values. An AI system built without transparency or public oversight will not become democratic just because someone deploys it in a democratic context. RENOVATING DEMOCRACY Schneier did not argue for slowing AI down. He argued for renovating the democratic institutions that AI is now operating inside. He pointed to Apertus3, an ethical AI project from Switzerland, and Singapore’s multilingual public model. His position: AI should be treated as public infrastructure, with accountability to citizens rather than shareholders. From an ISOC perspective, this lands on ground we already work. Multistakeholder participation, open standards, human rights: these are the principles we apply to internet governance, and they need to govern AI too. The Luxembourg event was a reminder that this conversation is moving fast, and that Europe is where the hardest governance choices are being made right now. I attended this event as part of ISOC Switzerland Chapter’s engagement with digital sovereignty public policy sessions and social impact policy work. 1 https://www.ictluxembourg.lu/2026/05/04/bruce/ 2 https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/6042/Rewiring-DemocracyHow-AI-Will-Transform-Our 3 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus The post AI and Democracy: Notes from Bruce Schneier’s keynote in Luxembourg appeared first on ISOC Switzerland Chapter.

Il giorno Lunedì 18 Maggio 2026 dalle ore 8.30 alle 16.30 presso l'IC Sauro Errico Pascoli di Napoli, in viale delle Galassie, 2 si terrà un CONVEGNO DI FORMAZIONE IN PRESENZA per il personale della scuola – con diretta su Peertube aperta a tutti e tutte -, organizzato dal gruppo intersindacale promotore della campagna "IA Basta", per promuovere una riflessione interdisciplinare sui temi connessi all'introduzione frettolosa e acritica della cosiddetta "Intelligenza Artificiale" nelle scuole italiane, a seguito della pubblicazione delle linee guida del Ministero dell'Istruzione e del Merito. Ospite d'onore della giornata sarà il Dr. Richard Matthew Stallman, informatico, inventore del software libero con il lancio nel 1983 della Free Software Foundation, seguita nel 1984 dalla creazione del sistema operativo GNU/Linux, oggi utilizzato da centinaia di milioni di utenti in tutto il mondo. La sua conoscenza del tema oggetto della conferenza risale fino ai primi anni della sua carriera, quando -studente presso il "Laboratorio di AI" del MIT diretto da Marvin Minsky- pubblicò una relazione sulla revisione controllata intitolata “dependency-directed backtracking” con Gerald Jay Sussman. Questa relazione fu un primo lavoro sul problema dell'”Intelligent backtracking” nel “constraint satisfaction problems”. L'iniziativa si inserisce all'interno di un vasto programma di convegni in tutta Italia, laboratori pomeridiani di pedagogia hacker a cura di C.I.R.C.E. e brevi webinar per presentare un Kit informativo con una serie di domande frequenti utili a condurre una discussione informata sul «Linee Guida del MIM per l'introduzione del'IA» negli Organi Collegiali.

Un altro web non è solo possibile ma è già realtà, si tratta solo di scegliere. Usare misure come proibire l'accesso ai social media ai minori non è la soluzione per diversi motivi. Educazione digitale, sensibilizzazione, sono tra i pochi metodi che potrebbero funzionare. I DIVIETI NON SERVONO A NIENTE Con Carlo Milani, esperto di Pedagogia hacker (CIRCE), proveremo a ragionare sulle nuove leggi che intendono regolamentare l’uso dei social media per i minori. Dall’Australia alla Spagna, si è decisa una stretta che non sembra particolarmente efficace; al di là dell’aspetto pratico, cercheremo di riflettere sul senso profondo del "divieto" in sé. Ascolta qui la puntata Piede Sinistro è un podcast di approfondimento, analisi e racconto di notizie, attualità e non solo. Uno spazio che non punta a dare risposte, ma a fornire chiavi di lettura e strumenti per affrontare la complessità del presente in autonomia.

Agnese Trocchi è ospite della seconda parte del Podcast Piede Sinistro. Tra artifici letterari e analisi dei fatti, si ragiona di social media e social network, con un’ottica che mira alla riappropriazione dello spazio internet. LA GRANDE PESTE Agnese Trocchi è l’autrice di “Internet, Mon Amour” (Altraeconomia) dove immagina lo scoppio nel 2016 della grande peste di internet. Tra artifici letterari e analisi dei fatti, continueremo a ragionare su social media e social network, con un’ottica che mira alla riappropriazione dello spazio internet. Ascolta qui il podcast Piede Sinistro è un podcast di approfondimento, analisi e racconto di notizie, attualità e non solo. Uno spazio che non punta a dare risposte, ma a fornire chiavi di lettura e strumenti per affrontare la complessità del presente in autonomia.

“Impariamo insieme a usare strumenti e alternative che non alimentano sistemi di controllo, guerra e sorveglianza”. Martedì 12 maggio a Roma un laboratorio pratico per rimettere le mani sul digitale e sperimentare alternative concrete alle piattaforme delle Big Tech. La Palestra Digitale è un laboratorio pratico organizzato con Avana e il gruppo di ricerca C.I.R.C.E., da Rotta Genuina e Vivèro, per rimettere le mani sul digitale e sperimentare alternative concrete alle piattaforme delle Big Tech. Uno spazio di condivisione di saperi, pratica collettiva e immaginazione: come usare la tecnologia in modo più consapevole, libero e comunitario. Qui puoi scoprire cosa abbiamo fatto nel primo incontro. IL PROGRAMMA DEL 12 MAGGIO: * App di messagistica: Signal e Jabber * Un cloud libero: Nextcloud e Cryptpad, non solo archivio file! * I Social network federati. Ci vediamo il 12 maggio alle 18.30 presso Vivèro, luogo di quartiere, via Antonio Raimondi 37, Roma. RISORSE * Strumenti Liberi per abbandonare le Big Tech al loro destino * Autodeterminazione digitale per tutte (un'altra lista di strumenti liberi)

Puntata del 30 aprile 2026 di Farhenheit: Da Gesù al mafioso: Trump il banalizzatore. Con Leonardo Bianchi e con Agnese Trocchi. Puntata del 30 aprile 2026 di Farhenheit: Da Gesù al mafioso: Trump il banalizzatore. Con Leonardo Bianchi, collaboratore di Internazionale e con Agnese Trocchi, scrittrice, artista, esperta di comunicazione digitale. Minuto 35'. Qui per ascoltare la puntata completa.