 I'm here because I like to learn about new technologies, new toys, fun new things. I like to learn about them, I like to talk about them, I like to play with them. But I'm not just here because I like to play with them. I also realize that I want to do more. I want to change the world in some way, I guess. And I get the feeling that quite a lot of us want to do that. But it can be frustrating, it can be hard, it can be kind of overwhelming. So for the last couple of years, our next speaker, Eric Albas, has been working with the Free Software Foundation Europe to try and influence policies, to try and get the world out. And they have tried a lot of different ways to do that. And he will now give us an overview of different ways to get involved, to get your message out there. And what's the best use case for different situations. Please welcome our next speaker, Eric Albas. Thank you very much for introducing me. Thank you very much for joining my talk. Thanks also to Shah for organizing this and in particular for all the angels who make this possible. As announced, I'd like to present four different campaigns today that you can use in the forefront of elections to get your topic into the head of politicians, into the press and into head of society. As said, I work for the Free Software Foundation Europe. So the examples I give here from the campaigns are about free software. But I will show you the general methods and the tools that we use. So you can adapt them to your topic. If you care about data protection or human rights or animal rights, you can use basically the same campaigns, adapt them to your needs, and make lobby for your topic. However, because all these examples are about free software, I want to briefly say what is free software and what is CFSV doing. Then I will show you the four campaigns in detail and the tools that we use. Afterwards, I will compare these campaigns and tell you about the advantages and disadvantages of the campaigns and also analyze them and help you to choose the right one for you to use. So what is free software? Free software is all the software that gives users the four freedoms, buy license gives users the four freedoms to use the software for any purpose, to study the software that basically means you can see the source code, to share the software that means you can share the software of the neighbor or you can upload it to the internet and to improve the software that means you can change the source code and publish an improved version. This is free software. Here are some prominent examples from Thunderbird to Linux to LibreOffice. The FSFV, the Free Software Foundation Europe, we are a non-profit association that has the mission to bring users in control of technology by furthering free software. Therefore, we help individuals and organizations to understand what is free software and why is free software important for our society. We give legal help with licenses for developers who like to free their source code or who like to implement free software in their development. We do consulting and public relations basically campaigns so we try to reach out into the society to let them know about free software. And we think that key point for development of our society is to bring free software into public education and into public administration. So whenever there is public money involved, there is public funding involved. For example, to develop free software, this software should also be public. This software should be under a free software license. Now I show you the campaigns that we use. So the first one is called Ask Your Candidates. But the name is a little bit misleading because actually it's more about asking political parties. It works much better with political parties. This is maybe the simplest campaign I will show you, but still is also one of the most powerful campaigns. So what you do first is you send a letter to the parties that are involved in the elections and then you ask them about your topic. So in our case it would be if you are going to win the election, are you planning to further free software? And if you do so, do you have any concrete plans? How you would like to achieve that? Do you support the use of free software in schools and similar questions? So you send these questions to the parties and you give them a deadline for you to answer them. And you tell them that the answers they will give, you are going to publish. So once you have the answers back, you do publish the answers that they have given you. This is an example from the Berlin State elections. Unfortunately it's in German, I'm sorry. Oh, you cannot see my pointer here. But you can see there's on top the question and below there's the different parties giving their answers. So here's the first step that you did. You asked the political parties about your topic and they somehow had to respond to it. They somehow had to think about it. They had to think about the topic and they are aware there are some people or organizations who are in favor of your topic. However, maybe you have eight questions and then you have eight participating parties. This is getting a huge text. This is getting kind of a text desert and it's not very appealing for people to read through. If they are not very into it. So as the next step, you should analyze it, comment it and invest make a press release. Make a summary, make a press release. Tell the people which parties are in favor of your topic, which parties not, or any particular things that you find in their answers. And write it up as if you would be a journalist. Publish the press release, of course. And to get more outreach, you should also get in contact with the press. And therefore it's so important that you write it in a press style, that you write it as you would be a journalist. Because journalists are really lazy and it will not help if you will send them a link and say, hey, look here, I made some questions to the political parties and here are the answers. Please look it up and write something. They will most probably not do it. So give them already a text that they can hopefully copy and paste. And then it's much, much more likely they will really publish it. I have just some examples here that we, for example, use. In our case, free software, of course, you have the tag magazines here on top that you can use. There is this join up, which is a portal from the European Commission with news about free software. NetsPolitik.org is a platform for digital rights, a German platform, journalist platform. And I also did put here the sun. It's not very likely maybe that you will appear in the sun and maybe also don't like to appear in the sun. I just put it here to help you think out of the box. Do not just only contact the two, three magazines you are reading daily. Think out of the box, okay, who can I send it to? I mean, once you have it written up, it's not much more work to send it to five or ten journalists more. And also very important here, this should be the local newspaper here. In particular, if you have local elections and you ask the parties who participate in local elections, and you have a nice write up and interesting story to tell, the local newspaper is most probably the one who will also publish it, and you will also reach the local people who are also interested in this local election. So don't forget your local newspaper. So the first step was we got our topic into the political parties. They had to respond to our answers. And the second step, we made some outreach here. We made it into the press so people read about it, people read about our topic. And as a third one, that depends a little bit on how the election finally is going, but in case there are some parties winning the elections that have been in favor of your topic, then this is the best time to come back on them and send them a letter again. Tell them congratulations for winning the party. We wish you a good legislation period. And just to remind you, you have been telling that you like to pay for free software. We are always here for you to help with it or offer your expertise. Give them a good feeling and so they should further care about your topic. In particular, I mean, if they have given very concrete answers, I mean, it depends a bit. Of course, you will not always get very concrete answers because politicians, they learn how to say a lot without saying anything. But in particular, if they have given concrete answers, you can the whole legislation period when there's happening something where there's legislation on the table, get back on them, remind them on what they have told you before the elections and give them some help in deciding. So this is the first campaign. This was, as I said, pretty simple. You don't need any software for it or something. Here's the second. Let them promise. The idea is that you write up a charter. You write up a charter and then you ask your candidates to sign it. So this is very candidate-based. This campaign, it works not so good with political parties. Because political parties, they basically, they cannot sign a charter. They have a party program and they stick to their party program. They will not sign a charter. No one maybe has, can be in charge of signing something like this. So this is candidate-based. And write up a charter with your topic. I will promise, when I get elected, I will promise that I will further free software, that I will take care of net neutrality and so on, make some points and then go to the candidates and let them sign it. The sexiness a little bit is here for the candidates that they don't have to write something. They don't have to answer you in a free text or so. They don't have to think so much. They can read through your charter and they can say yes or no, basically. However, a politician, I mean, they don't like to promise so much. So the deal that you make, you tell them we make a campaign and we will show everyone who signs this charter. We have a web page. People can see who signs the charter and this is the deal because believe it or not, there will be politicians who are in favor of your topic. And these politicians, they can show their voters, see I care, I care about free software. I signed the charter from the Free Software Foundation in Europe. If you're going to elect me, I will be in favor of free software, for example. Here's an example we made for the European elections in 2014. We aligned with some other NGOs. We called it RePromise and then we came up with the charter about digital rights and asked basically all the candidates for the European Union elections to sign it. Then we made this web page so voters can see who did sign the charter. You can see in the Netherlands there have been 29 candidates who did sign it and in total it's have been more than 400 candidates who signed the charter. So again you have the politicians, they have to think about do I sign it or not. You also have the outreach factor, you have a campaign, you have a web page. So also people get aware, they get aware of your activity, but they also get aware of your topic and that you care about it. Finally, this is again very good for lobbying after the elections because once the election is done, you have a database of candidates who did sign a charter that says they are in favor of your topic. So after the elections, when there is a legislation on the table, these are the people, definitely you should come back on them and say look we have some concerns about this legislation because of this and that or we are very much in favor of this legislation. Can you please support it? You have some kind of, you couldn't put some kind of pressure on these candidates in favor of your topic. We made this campaign with some partners together and this is very, very helpful and very important. When you do such a campaign, try to get some partners, try to get some partners that are in the same topical field as you are because having partners helps so much. It helps of course with the efforts that you have to do like setting up the web page and so on. You can share the work but you can also share the fame. I mean, in this case there are multiple NGOs in here. Each NGO has some fame, each NGO has their own press lists, have their own community people. So the outreach factor is much, much higher if you are with partners. Also it's much, much more likely that candidates will sign it because if they see oh, there's multiple NGOs asking me to sign it, you have more awareness of it when candidates see it while you are alone. So this is true for all the campaigns I'm explaining here. The third campaign is Freedom Vote. Freedom Vote was co-authored by the FSB team Switzerland. And here the idea is this campaign reaches out to the voters. What they did is, I mean, Switzerland has this direct democracy elements and it's very, very candidate based. So what they did is they sent all the candidates a questionnaire to mark, they were having some scares and they could mark, okay, I am in favor of net neutrality, I am in favor supporting open educational resources or supporting free software and similar questions. And then they filled out the database to show all the candidates and how they positioned themselves along your questions. Then what you could do is, I wrote your online politician matching because voters, they could go on that page and they could answer these questions themselves and then they can compare themselves with the candidates. So you can see here you have some metadata about the candidates and here you can see how the candidate positioned herself and how you positioned yourself. And then you can see, okay, we are together here on the same side regarding open education but regarding net neutrality and she has another opinion that I have. And so this is a help for the voters to decide whom to vote on. It's maybe not so good for afterwards lobbying because scaling yourself and positioning yourself in favor or not so much in favor of is not as concrete as answering a question. But on the other hand, it helps you hopefully with some virality because it's something people can use, they can go to your page, it's kind of interesting, they can make an account and see how they positioned themselves with the candidates and maybe they can share some screenshots on social media. It has a graphical interface. So this is appealing to the voters more than for lobbying. But this is of course also very good if you can get to the voters and you can get your message to the people. This is also what we all look for to get our message out. The FSV team Netherlands, they adopted the software and made a version that is not for the candidates but for the parties. But it's basically the same, so the parties had to position themselves on these topics and the voters could go there, and see which party matches best my own political opinion. Here's the software meta information. So main author is Swiss Open, is it called? It's a new GPL license. You can see here the code and the API. So far there's a Swiss version and a Dutch version. So be the next to use it. Finally, this is the newest campaign that we have. It's called Digital OMAD, which is based in Germany. There is an agency for political education. And this agency, since several years already, in the forefront of every election, they come up with a Valomad, which basically means vote OMAD. Where they ask the political parties questions. And these political parties, they can say yes, maybe or no. And then they have this web page where voters can go and voters can answer the same questions. Very, very simple. Yes, maybe no. Go through the questions and get a result. So we picked up the whole concept for getting more attention for our campaign, because it's very, very popular in Germany, actually. And so we called it Digital OMAD. We picked up the same concept. We have these questions. You have a very simple interface. Yes, maybe no. And this is so easy. I think even my grandmother can do it. And once you have done, then you get a result and you see which political parties are in favor of your political opinion. So this is, again, very voter-orientated. It helps voters in deciding which parties they should vote on if they care about the topic. And at the same time, so simple that the usage is very higher. I think the usage from the official version is very, very high. And we ran it for the first time. So I hope the federal elections are in the end of September. I hope also that we get a lot of usage here with this. After the results, you can also, by the way, you can then, because the parties have also the possibility to not only say yes, maybe no, they can also answer why they have chosen yes or no or something. So voters who have more interest in just clicking a little bit, they can afterwards read through their results and see what in particular are the parties saying here to the questions. Again, the software meta-information here. It's the main authors, digital science and stories. It's an MIT license. You can see the code. And as it's so new, there are not yet any forks. I invite you to be the first one to fork it. And so these are the four different campaigns. And now I want to show you some, I want to give you some guidance on which campaigns fits best your needs or your purposes. Here's an overview with the best feature, anti-feature, and the target group. I said that was the campaign where you simply file in questions and publish the answers of the political parties. The best feature is that you hopefully get concrete statements because if you get concrete statements, this is something that you can work with. This is something, the whole legislation period, you can work with, you can get back on them, say, look, this is what you said, now keep your word, or you could make some bad press. Say it maybe a little bit more nicely, but this is actually the pressure that you can give to them. The anti-feature here was that this text desert is not very appealing, and users, they spend 10 seconds on your page, they will not read through the whole text. So you have to do some more work. You have to write it up, you have to summarize it and make it in a way that it's more appealing to the users. And that goes along with the target group. The main target group, at first hand, here is the press and doing PR about it. And later, if the party, if there's a promising party succeeding in the election, then you can also use it for lobbying. Then there was this Let's Promise. The best feature is that it helps you spread your topic. I mean, you send each candidate, you send a charter. Each candidate has to think about it, shall I sign it or not, read through your charter, see maybe how, what are the most important things right now in your topic, and has to think about it. The anti-feature here is that it depends a lot on the participation, because in the end, if you just have a few amount of candidates who participate in your charter, then you cannot do so good press with this. So be careful also with your charter. Don't demand too much, else it's very unlikely they sign it. Make something politically compromised between demanding and still giving the option for them to sign it. Here is the party. The target group are the parties or the politicians that you work with them because they have to sign the charter. Freedom Mode was the campaign from the Swiss team who where the candidates put themselves in a matrix about your topic. Here's the best feature, the individual approach, because users, they can go, the users can make their own matrix. They can compare themselves with the candidates. It's a little bit like gaming, and that helps you hopefully with virality. The anti-feature here is very complex for the press to write it up. I mean, if you imagine you have 500 candidates like in Swiss, then what charter journalists write about it except that it exists and how it works, but you cannot summarize it. So that's why the target group is the voters. You like here mainly to get voters on your page, read about your topic, and think about your topic. And finally, the digital mode. Here's the best feature. It's so simple to use it. And also the user gets the question, and the user has to think for him or herself, am I in favor of this or not? So you make the user think, but the rest is just simply clicking. Yes, no, maybe. And this works. I mean, everyone can understand it, I think. The anti-feature here is a little bit, I wrote you a statement versus facts, because we have the experience, we made a test run in North Westphalia, and we made a little bit of the experience that parties, it's not what they normally do, and then they tell you something and you are not sure if this is now a statement or is it just something written up. So that's why it's also maybe not working so good for lobbying afterwards. And that is why the target group here, again the main target group is the voters, get your message into society to the voters. This is basically the same overview in a graphical way. So when you like to get your topic into the press, into the election, I mean, election times are a really, really good time to do it. That's why we do it for election time, because election times, the weeks before the elections, all the press talks about the election, talks about the political parties, people, neighbors talk with each other about political topics. So take the time, use the time before the elections, and then if you'd like to use it, then think before, okay, what do I like to achieve? Do I like to get more press or make something participatory and, in the best case, going viral? And on the other axis, you have the, do I want to go to the public and reach out to the voter or do I like to reach out to politicians and make lobbying afterwards with my campaign? So you can see here in a graphical way the different campaigns. Also, you should consider what democratic system you are living in, because basically, mainly, I mean, we have, in Europe, we have very different political systems running in the different countries, but on one big category, if you have more of a proportional representation system or a majority voting system, because a proportional representing system leads more to a party-based elections, while the majority voting system leads to candidate-based elections. And based on that, you should use also these campaigns that I showed you, because asking candidates, for example, it will not work with candidates. If you have 500 candidates, you cannot send them all multiple questions with free text. No one can read through it, not even you yourself, and analyze it and summarize it. So this is for the party-based elections, as well as the digital OMAD, because the same again, the voters, they cannot, for every candidate, click through yes, no, maybe, and compare them afterwards. But the freedom vote and the let's promise, they have been the campaigns that are in particular for the candidates, because let's promise, as I said, parties will not sign a charter for you, and freedom vote is the software where the users can compare themselves with the candidates. Also consider, if you are in a federal state, then be aware, sorry, then be aware that there are different power levels. So on a state's level, or on the national level, don't mix them up, don't ask the wrong questions to the wrong level, so don't ask the federal parties about topics that are decided on the state's level and vice versa. Here I made an overview about the woman hours necessary for the different campaigns. This is just an estimation. It's basically to show you, from my experience, how much time is needed for the different campaigns. So freedom vote and let's promise are the most time consuming campaigns, because you have the software, you adapt the software, and then you write a charter or a matrix, and then you send it to every candidate, then afterwards you fill your database with all the data. So these are the most time consuming campaigns. Digital Ahmad is somehow the same, but as it's for the party-based elections, it's just less amount of work, but also you have to adapt the software here, you have to make your questions and fill your database, of course, it's much, much smaller. And asking candidates, as initially said, is the simplest one. You do not need any software, you just send them your questions, and then you publish the answers and analyze them and make press with it. So here's another version of a schedule. This is also some estimation of how much time you should consider. Sometimes you, for example, with asking candidates, you should begin early to send in the questions, but then you have a time span where you do nothing, because you wait, you give them four weeks to answer and then you wait four weeks. But I think three months in general is the point three months before election. With every campaign, basically the latest point you should start to have enough time to do the campaign, right? And depending on if you use the software and freedom mode and so on, then you should first do the preparation before you start with your campaign. Also you can see here that asking candidates, and let's promise, depending on the outcome of the elections, these are the campaigns, again, that you can hopefully use for further lobbying during the legislation period. And what you can also see, let's promise is a particular case here. You have no deadline. You have been with all the other campaigns, you have some, at some point of time, you have a deadline when you like to start, when you like to have your results, and then you like to do your PR with the results that you got. While, let's promise, this is the campaign where the candidates are in the charter, I mean, why not let them sign the charter even one day before the election? It's good for you because the more people you have, I mean, you should have some amount for making your PR, but afterwards they can still sign it. I mean, every signee helps you later after the elections. So here are my final tips. If you like to campaign for your topic in the forefront of elections, choose your method wisely. And depending on your democratic system, depending on if you like to reach out to your voters or to the press, just what I told you, choose your method wisely. Think about before, what do I like to achieve? And depending on that, choose your campaign. Be in time, this is also very, very important. It's really, really frustrating if you do a lot of work and then you don't make it in time. So if you think about making a campaign, start thinking about it half a year before the elections. Make yourself a schedule. Get some partners, which is the next point. Get some partners to share your work and then make a realistic schedule to achieve your campaign. Remember that partners is not just for sharing your work. Partners is also important to benefit from each other's fame and to get more outreach to press and also to the candidates. And depending on the results of the elections and the campaign that you used, use your information after the election for further lobbying. Get back to the parties or the candidates when there's something at stake. Tell them this is before the elections, what you have told. Now keep your word and do good for pre-software in our case. And of course the most important tip in all aspects, don't panic. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. So we have a couple of minutes for questions, I guess. If you have any questions, please line up to microphones in the middle and then we will just call on you. And since you seem to be shy, I'll start off. So just assuming I want to influence something, how's your experience been with getting actual answers from the press and from the candidates? As the Free Software Foundation is recognized as known as an entity, do you think like a small group of two or three people have a chance of getting this feedback? All these answers? I think it works. It should be somehow some kind of an organization but I don't think it has to be a really, really famous one or something. But I think it works much better if you, for example with your local Linux user group or another local association, this could work perfectly, especially also for local elections, I think it works perfectly also with this. There's not much fame needed, but maybe it works better if you somehow some organizations and you are not a single person that... I can imagine that. But yeah, don't be shy. Take your local association and make them some pressure. Yes, we have one question. Do you know anything about the process behind how it's been decided, what kind of statements are included? In the Valomad? Yeah, the Valomad, they have volunteers. Actually you can apply as a volunteer and then they have, I think like 50 people or so and they gather one weekend and then they together work on the questions that will end up, however, it's too hard. So I think they make 100 questions and 40 out of these questions or 30 out of these questions will finally end up... Because we also try to undermine it actually. We had a supporter in there, but it's pretty hard because it's too hard and mentored and in the end the agency of political education decides. But they try to get some input from volunteers. Alright, cheers. So I guess if there are no more questions now, people can also come to you at the Free Software Foundation. Yeah, we have a village here. I think it's Olsen Field, but I also think it has no name. It's actually between the two lakes on the map, between the two lakes on the right side. You will see it, it's very exposed. I will be there all the day. You can come and talk to me. And also I want to announce there's the lightning talks in the RE10, and there will be today a choir singing the Free Software song. So if you'd like to hear this, please pass by and please pass by anytime at the village of the Free Software Foundation Europe. Cool, then thank you very much again. It was a very interesting talk. Thank you.