2024 was a relatively quiet year for the Interpeer Project, so it’s only right to go out with a bang: Interpeer gUG joined the Datacom Industry Association as a founding member in December!
DIA aims to be the voice for the European Datacom Industry & Research Community, with its focus on secure, innovative, and collaborative digital communication solutions. We’re incredibly proud to be a part of this group!
At Interpeer, we consider it of vital importance Europe’s drive towards digital sovereignty is well supported by the R&D community, and a healthy digital commons is an essential component of any strategy pursuing this goal. There is no digital sovereignty if digital communications solutions are captured, either because standards or implementations are not part of the commons.
It is particularly alarming that examples such as the threat to Europe’s Next Generation Internet programme keep occurring. While recent years saw the emergence of many funding efforts to support Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) better, the funds scopes have also narrowed dramatically, focusing predominantly on such FLOSS packages that are already part of solutions provided to the public sector.
While the importance of supporting such software is undeniable, this narrow focus immediately excludes existing software that may yet be adopted, software that is publicly available but not provided by the public sector, as well as any endeavours that look beyond the status quo. It is a conservative approach rather than one that looks at securing the future.
We therefore consider DIA as a necessary vehicle for representing the longer term view to European institutions charged with pursuing digital sovereignty strategies.
Our motivation for joining in the foundation of the association is so inextricably linked with our motivation for developing a human-centric Internet: an Internet that continues to serve the needs of every person, and improves in doing so – a true commons.