How can we be independent from big corporations and their cloud servers? Can we build digital technologies for the common good while advancing user freedom? Is it possible to secure access to vital information for isolated communities and in places of confinement? Or to extend the life of consumer electronics? Can we share our online videos without relying on the major commercial platforms?
If key questions like these pique your interest, you’ve come to the right place. In this publication, you’ll find a collection of interviews from the series “Building a Free Internet of the Future”, published monthly by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) between 2024 and 2025. This series focuses on the experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities supported by the NGI Zero (NGI0) grants for free software, open data, open hardware and open standards projects – who are often absent from dominant technological narratives.
Aiming to foster a more inclusive and accessible digital future, NGI0 provides financial and practical support to individuals, non-profit or for-profit organisations, research groups and collectives in different ways, including mentoring, testing, security testing, accessibility, dissemination and more. Their real-life experiences reveal the concrete challenges of digital exclusion and the innovations they have developed to overcome them. Rather than focus on abstract technological ideals, each interview highlights practical, community-based initiatives, tangible actions and replicable models that others can learn from and adapt.
Here you will find conversations about access to vital information anywhere; balancing accessibility and privacy for secure digital collaboration; a printer for embossing texts and plans; how we write our political values into our code; digital accessibility as a human right; an alternative to YouTube; the urgency of offering services to civil society; open source software in healthcare; free software for self-organising and local communities; access to information when websites are experiencing technical difficulties or are being blocked; extending the life of consumer electronics and much more. They reflect on the challenges, limitations, power relations and labour relations that permeate the field of free technologies – seeking to avoid a simplistic or solutionist approach, and instead create necessary conversations.
By bringing these conversations together, this publication becomes yet another way to share information about alternative services and infrastructures, as well as reflections on the political choices behind technologies. It documents a visionary, grounded, creative and diverse movement for an internet that serves everyone, not just those with the most power or wealth. Hopefully, sharing these voices will help us broaden necessary debates and identify steps to build digital futures in which the technologies that permeate the daily lives of millions of people are not only those based on extractivism, intensified surveillance and warfare, concentration of power, and accentuated inequalities.
Xavier Coadic, a free/libre and open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free and open source cultures and communities, was in charge of leading the interviews that you will find here. He once said:
“The code we create and the tools we use can help or harm humanity. We embed our political values in our code,” Esther Payne told me during an interview for the “Building a Free Internet of the Future” series. [...] Sharing is caring. I put a bit of myself into what I shared. And I will continue to ensure that things that cause problems are done differently. I will continue to try to work with others to create the conditions for the creation and implementation of technology that can belong to everyone. And I am not doing it alone. We are doing it together.
We hope these conversations inspire you and ignite a renovated hope in concrete and potential possibilities for all people, particularly the marginalised, to use and shape the internet and digital technologies to create a just and sustainable world. For us at APC, they certainly support this broader vision, while reinforcing our commitment to promoting a free, open and inclusive internet.