Interviews

Meet MULTIVERSE - A team which created multiple Import/Export/Sync options and UI Designer, making it possible to create any app. Learn more from this interview with Lauri Ojansivu. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? Lauri Ojansivu:maintainer of WeKan Open Source kanban https://wekan.github.io4 th most active GitHub committer at Finland https://commits.top/finland.htmlCloud Architect, SysAdmin, SysOpCEO of WeKan Team https://wekan.team .WeKan Team:About 300 contributors worldwide What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? I started maintaining WeKan at December 2016, because I had already translated it to Finnish, and imported all myboards from Trello to WeKan. I prefer to self-host my private data. In simple words, what challenges does your project address? - Speed. Using WeKan with tens of thousands of users.- Importing more data from other softwares to WeKan What solution are you developing? Moving code from frontend to backend, so that webpages load faster. Meteor WeKan has about 10 MB of Javascript at frontend.Moving data from MongoDB SQLite, and later to other SQL databases. This reduces amount of disk space and required amount of CPU and RAM usage.This has been requested by many WeKan users.WeKan is used at most countries of the world, and translated to about 70+ languages. Benefit is to allWeKan users that have lot of users and big boards.WeKan is most full-featured and user friendly Open Source kanban available. What are the next steps? - Continuing creating minimized versions of pages- After minimizing, add optional layers like end-to-end encryption, etc- Adding more compatible drag-drop code that would work on more browsers, where it does not work yet- Continuing making UI more configurable- Adding many more Import/Export/Sync options- Merging Meteor WeKan and Multiverse WeKan features- Adding migrations from Meteor WeKan to Multiverse WeKan- Releasing Multiverse WeKan to all platforms as upgrade, bringing benefits to everyone- Adding more platforms, like those where SQLite is...

SelectShare seeks to promote the use of open standards and open software that will enhance user privacy, enable decentralization, and increase interoperability. Find out more in this interview with Nikos Fotiou. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? I am postdoc researcher at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). AUEB coordinates the project through the Mobile Multimedia Laboratory (MMlab). Two Greek SMEs that are active in the smart energy domain, DomX and Plegma, complete the consortium. Our project team is composed of 14 members with complementary skills. SelectShare’s team combines a strong track record of scientific research related to our project’s technology, as well as significant business experience accumulated through large scale deployments of systems related to our project. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? The team seeks to promote the use of open standards and open software that will enhance user privacy, will enable decentralization, and will increase interoperability. AUEB’s main goal is to affect and motivate ongoing standardization efforts in the domains of the Web of Things (WoT) and Self-Sovereign Identification (SSI). The main goal of Plegma and DomX is to enhance their existing Internet of Things (IoT) products and services in the smart energy field by integrating the project outcomes, improving their interoperability, and expanding their customer reach by allowing the use of IoT data across different applications and products.   In simple words, what challenges does your project address? Although the IoT is expected to generate vast amounts of data, the potentials of these data are limited by security and privacy concerns, as well as by the lack of interoperability. Nevertheless, these data can be valuable for other stakeholders that can collect and analyse them to provide “over the top” services. In order to achieve that, several challenges have to be overcome: a) a...

Meet LiberaForms - Free form software that respect the digital rights of the people who use it. Learn more from this interview with Chris Fanning. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? We are a small group of people concerned about and happy to provide solutions that attend to data sovereignty and in particular, on-line forms. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? Too often as individuals and as a team we must confront difficulties accessing data, and digital services in general. We are Free software advocates and believe that open standards felicitate data portability. In simple words, what challenges does your project address? LiberaForms aims to help keep people’s data out of the hands of greedy surveillance capitalism. This may seem a mammoth undertaking but in reality it is simply a question of ‘doing’ instead of just ‘talking’ about our concerns. As LiberaForms becomes more mature, and therefore a real viable option, our main challenge is uptake. What solution are you developing? We first conceived LiberaForms when neighbors in our part of Barcelona needed a reliable way to solicit support for their local initiate. Over the summer holidays of 2019 we coded the basics to enable the easy creation of on-line forms. Since then more and more people are becoming interested in the software and we have gladly continued to develop it. What are the next steps? Continue development, continue defining and building our road to project sustainability, make our client base grow, incorporate new software functionality, strengthen the team.

BDI team enables organisations to easily and reliably examine and convert biometric data into a completely open-source format based on ISO standards. Find out more in this interview with Artem Poliakov. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? Our team consists of 4 members located in Estonia and Ukraine. The core team has been working with various biometric technologies for over 5 years, developing and implementing solutions that enable users to authenticate themselves using any combination of facial, iris, and fingerprint technologies. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? We want to be actively involved in building solutions that help people improve their lives through data portability. We see that access to data portability is a key requirement for societal and economic development all over the globe especially in the developing world. We want to play an active role in creating technologies that can enable everyone to benefit from the benefit of access to safe, trusted biometric technologies in an ecosystem that is diverse and highly interoperable based on open-source principles.   In simple words, what challenges does your project address? Biometrics are one of the strongest technologies for people to verify their identity. Unfortunately, the biometric industry is dominated with closed source proprietary formats for storing biometric data. This presents challenges for organisations adopting biometric technologies and for end users wishing to understand what personal data is stored in their biometric data.  Our project enables organisations to easily and reliably examine and convert biometric data into a completely open-source format based on ISO standards. Enabling organisations more freedom in how they adopt and switch between biometric device vendors.  What solution are you developing? Our solution to global biometric format vendor lock-in is to create an open source engine that allows users to convert their biometric data between formats into one open-source format...

Available data portability public resources are just a click away! Feel free to take a look at NGI DAPSI's list of public resources.   

Meet COLLABORA - A team which works on development of a selection of missing interoperability features in LibreOffice Technology & Collabora Online. Learn more from this interview with Miklos Vajna. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? I’m Miklos Vajna, Consultancy Lead at Collabora Productivity, working on Collabora Online / LibreOffice more or less since 2012. I also worked on the “clearing break” and “content controls” parts of the project myself. The team also included Andras Timar for project management, Eloy Crespo for business development, Rashesh Padia for content control development, Tomaz Vajngerl for sparklines & chart data tables, Lubos Lunak for jumbo sheets. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? We believe that the ability to run your own office suite in the cloud and/or premise is an important step towards digital sovereignty. We move towards this goal by checking what features office documents in the wild contain and we address some of these gaps in Collabora Online & LibreOffice: so you can move your data from public clouds (especially from the ones running outside the EU) into private clouds or on-premise, without losing features. In simple words, what challenges does your project address? The project addresses the challenge that public cloud offerings from tech giants are really comfortable for the users, they provide a huge feature set. We want to improve the privacy of users, provide them with digital sovereignty as they move their data & document editing service to an open-source solution like Collabora Online – without having to give up on feature they like from previous solutions. What solution are you developing? We develop missing interoperability features for Collabora Online and LibreOffice, so that its already quite good rendering gets even closer to perfect. We saw these features frequently requested, but this project allows accessing necessary funding to...

Meet SADS4DDS - An open source solution to enable data sovereignty by introducing data privacy and security policy portability and prototyping distributed data privacy and security policy management. Learn more from this interview with Federico Michele Faccia. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? Martel Innovate is boutique consulting company, specialized in innovative projects. As part of our philosophy we strive to innovate and drive open source technologies, especially in the context of FIWARE. The team is led by Dr. Federico M. Facca, the CTO of Martel since 2016. Federico is the father of Orchestra Cities, Martel Innovate open source smart city platform and he is a core figure in FIWARE being part of BOD and TSC. The business activities are coordinated by Dr. Giovanni Rimassa, the Chief Innovation Officer at Martel. For 20+ years he was a software engineer, IT consultant, startup co-founder, senior researcher and product manager for intelligent software products in BPM and other domains. Federico and Giovanni are assisted by other colleagues in Martel to realize Anubis vision. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? Orchestra Cities is the flagship product from Martel in the IoT and Smart Cities middleware platform arena. The product positioning revolves around the triad of Open Standards, Open Data, Open API, is fully Open Source, and is a leading solution leveraging the FIWARE data models and standard components. Thanks to its positioning, Orchestra Cities leverage extensions and applications from third parties, thus making natural for it to share to and integrate data from different platforms. Enabling data sovereignty and security policies portability is more and more fundamental requirements for both public administration and the citizenship, key stakeholders in Martel’s IoT and Smart Cities projects. Thus supporting an easy and effective way to guarantee data sovereignty in an open and infrastructure agnostic way...

Meet SOLIDGROUND - Federated service platform for domain driven application development. Learn more from this interview with Arnold Schrijver. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? My name is Arnold Schrijver and I live in The Netherlands. After a long career in IT in many different roles and a 2-year stint in bootstrapping two startups, I became full-time engaged with Free Software in 2017, living on my own savings. Starting 2018, worried about various tech trends, I was among the first to sign up to The Center for Humane Technology co-founded by Tristan Harris (“The Social Dilemma” on Netflix). With consent of the founders I initiated the independent Humane Tech Community on their forum. As facilitator I have been a tireless humane technology promoter ever since. In recent years my activity shifted towards the Fediverse, based on the W3C ActivityPub and related open standards. I am active across the web and in many communities and forums to help further the technology base and foster community collaboration. My project started as “Groundwork”, but is now named Solidground. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? For a long time the vision of The Decentralized Web by Tim Berners-Lee has fascinated me. The decentralization of the web, based on open standards is vital to break the dominance of Big Tech companies and ensure a level playing field exists where everyone has inclusive access and equal opportunities. What stood out however was how many initiatives had already come and failed. The decentralized technology landscape is littered with tombstones that are fading in history. With delight I then found the Fediverse. Already used by millions of fedizens around the world, it showed that real alternatives to the proprietary and corporate web not only are viable, but can truly prosper. Without ads, engagement-driving algorithms and  many passionate Free...

Meet E2EE - The project that researches and implements end-to-end encryption for the /e/ cloud, so that data migration and data sharing become more secure for our users. Learn more from this interview with Rik Viergever. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? /e/ builds privacy-safe and open-source smartphone operating systems (OS) and provides related cloud storage and services. /e/ is the privacy-safe and open-source alternative to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. /e/ currently has >13000 active mobile users. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? Our cloud services provide our users the option to store personal data on /e/’s servers, to use these data with online services, to import and export the data to and from other providers, and to share the data with other service providers. /e/ supports data portability and interoperability in any way it can: we make use of open-source technologies and open standards, so users can easily share data with other service providers and import and export their data to and from our cloud. In simple words, what challenges does your project address? For this project, we will research and implement end-to-end encryption for the /e/ cloud, so that our users will be able to share, migrate and store their data using the highest encryption standards. What solution are you developing? For this project we will strengthen the encryption of the /e/ cloud, so that data migration and data sharing become more secure for our users. E2EE is the highest standard in encryption these days, so it is a logical step for us to take as an organization that aims to empower consumers in terms of digital privacy. The main beneficiaries will be /e/cloud users and especially people who also have an /e/OS mobile phone. What are the next steps? The next steps for us will be...

Meet DYBLI - A team which envisions a flexible and interoperable software framework for building secure, server-less, and offline-first collaborative applications with the Solid Protocol. Learn more from this interview with Normand Overney. Can you briefly introduce yourself and your team? We founded the company from a group of master students from the computer science department at the University of Basel, Switzerland. The founding members are Normand Overney, Niluka Piyasinghe, Fabrizio Parrillo. Normand Overney has a background in bioinformatics and has worked for many Biotech companies working on data analysis and software development. Niluka works with lower-level languages, embedded systems, and manages our external software team. Fabrizio is currently working on his PhD in computer networking at the University of Basel and has the domain knowledge for the technologies ranging from distributed systems to Linked Data. What is your motivation to work in the data portability field? We are passionate about creating software which is flexible and collaborative. With increasing demands for greater data sharing and verifiability, we see an opportunity to expand the data portability domain with the integration of pre-existing tools into a developer friendly interface.  There is a huge potential for optimization and with every increasing demand for security and governmental regulations the field is bound to develop rapidly.  We are excited to be a part of a fast-paced domain which pushes others to innovate. In simple words, what challenges does your project address? The challenge we are addressing is data interoperability and compatibility. We have built a backend solution, Dybli Core, which allows for developers to save structured data without conflicts and also keeping track of the who, what, and when.  Thereby, our project is applicable to a variety of fields from IoT to personal apps.  In the last years there has been a great shift to move cooperate infrastructure...