WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:11.600 Hi, thanks everyone for being here. My name is Lorenzo Vett. I am going to talk about open 00:11.600 --> 00:22.440 sourcing democracy with open sour software. So just a quick word of intro. I am the co-founder 00:22.440 --> 00:28.120 of Madada, which is the French instance of Alavitelli, which I'm going to be talking about. 00:28.120 --> 00:33.080 This is like a bunch of ways you can get in touch. The French thing is a little bit 00:33.080 --> 00:38.080 important, because it might taint a little bit the way I describe things, but this is an 00:38.080 --> 00:46.480 international talk by essence. So access to information, I don't know how familiar you are 00:46.480 --> 00:52.480 with it, but it's also sometimes referred to as FYI, free number of information, access 00:52.480 --> 00:57.160 to documents, there's like a ton of different acronyms. I'm going to try to stick to 00:57.160 --> 01:03.800 ITI or access to information, but all of these things collectively, I'll use them to refer 01:03.800 --> 01:09.720 to this process of you being allowed to ask your state, your government, the public service, 01:09.720 --> 01:15.080 or even contractors to the public service for information or for documents about how 01:15.080 --> 01:19.920 they function, how they operate. And maybe this is where the French thing comes in, maybe 01:19.920 --> 01:26.280 you get an answer to your question. And so what I'm going to try to use as a metaphor 01:26.320 --> 01:31.880 in this talk is that this is a kind of debugger for understanding how your government 01:31.880 --> 01:37.120 operates, because you can go beyond the sort of print statement that the government does 01:37.120 --> 01:40.640 and says, here's my PR, we're doing this, we're doing that, and you can kind of go, 01:40.640 --> 01:47.160 no, but I want to know this other thing that is hidden behind. This is a map of ATI laws 01:47.160 --> 01:53.280 around the world. The QR codes have no trackers that I know of, so you can safely use 01:53.360 --> 01:59.440 them, they will like link to the very sources of the slides that I'm showing. This is 01:59.440 --> 02:06.720 supposed to show like the quality of the laws, theoretically, country per country, you noticed 02:06.720 --> 02:11.200 that for instance, Afghanistan has some of the best access to information laws in the world. 02:11.200 --> 02:18.560 It's not quite true, but most of these to show you that ATI laws are almost everywhere around 02:18.640 --> 02:26.480 the world, and chances are that your country has some variations of it. 02:26.480 --> 02:32.320 Alabama, so this is the software that we're interested in today. The name comes from the 02:32.320 --> 02:38.160 birth city of the father of the first access to information laws, which if I'm not mistaken 02:38.160 --> 02:44.560 or turning 250 years old today, that was up in Sweden, Alabama, it was in Finland, that was 02:44.640 --> 02:51.360 a part of Sweden at the time like complicated story. So, Alabama is a web app that is meant to 02:51.360 --> 03:00.080 simplify the process of writing and obtaining responses to your requests. In a way you could look 03:00.080 --> 03:07.680 at it as like glorified inbox with extensions for dealing with access to information. The other 03:07.680 --> 03:13.840 thing that it does is the process is completely public and transparent, so you can go on an 03:13.840 --> 03:19.120 elevator instance and see what other people have asked and what responses they have received 03:19.120 --> 03:24.720 or not received, and therefore you can sort of understand a little bit better what the government 03:24.720 --> 03:30.880 what the state is doing. So, in a way, thinking of that debugger metaphor, elevator is kind of a 03:30.880 --> 03:36.880 gooey on top of the debugger. You don't need to use it, but it makes it easier to use, especially 03:36.880 --> 03:41.200 when you're a beginner, and you don't know all the sort of like command lines syntax kind of thing. 03:42.080 --> 03:48.640 This is what it looks like, so up there is a screenshot, this is the British instance. I just 03:48.640 --> 03:52.080 picked that because it's English and I assume that it would be easier for everyone to read. 03:52.880 --> 03:58.000 This is the meat of one request that I'm going to talk about in a moment. Again, the QR code 03:58.000 --> 04:02.800 links to that actually page so you can go and like see the whole thing. On the far side there, 04:02.800 --> 04:08.080 there's like the entire thread of ping pong between the person asking the question and the 04:08.080 --> 04:15.280 administration answering. A little bit of tech, because this is for stem, this is the most 04:15.280 --> 04:21.040 tech you're going to see in this talk. Elevitally was born in 2007, around 2007, in the UK, 04:21.760 --> 04:27.440 to Ruby on Raids web apps, so this was like the tech of the time, and then beneath that, 04:27.440 --> 04:32.000 there's the whole sort of boring tech stack of the usual suspects of PostgreSQL, 04:32.000 --> 04:38.720 readies, and then the whole mail thing, like Elevitally is quite email heavy, so you've got 04:39.680 --> 04:45.760 all the bits and bobs that you need to like run this and exchanging at send them and receive them. 04:46.560 --> 04:53.280 Again, link to the source code, it's HPLV3, so you're free to do everything that you can do with that. 04:54.800 --> 05:00.400 The future of Elevitally, so I'll stop here and say thank you to NGIZ, Eurinen and Net for 05:00.640 --> 05:06.320 sponsoring us, they've sponsored our work repeatedly in France and internationally. Right now we're 05:06.320 --> 05:11.440 working on GDPR compliance, so it sounds a bit weird, but there's a lot of personal information 05:11.440 --> 05:16.960 in those exchanges, because their emails are answered by civil servants and so on, so we get a lot of 05:16.960 --> 05:24.880 GDPR work to stay in compliance with the law. We're also working on improving search, because we actually 05:25.040 --> 05:31.200 starting to have several gigabytes and gigabytes of public documents in all sorts of formats. 05:31.200 --> 05:38.160 There's PDF, there's whatever dox, obviously a lot of Microsoft things, but also there's things like 05:38.160 --> 05:44.720 3D scans of statues and weird things like this, which are a bit difficult to search through, 05:45.760 --> 05:49.600 so we're going to work on improving this and then going further, we'll also look at 05:49.680 --> 05:56.400 the thing better stats about the response rates of different public entities and so on. 05:57.120 --> 06:02.560 There's always a little bit of improvement on the automation, because there's a lot of basic 06:03.520 --> 06:09.040 helping people and sorting out some problems like an email of that address that doesn't work 06:09.040 --> 06:14.160 in this kind of things. We've done some nix packaging, if there's any nix fans in the room 06:15.040 --> 06:22.240 to try and help streamline the operations of it. This is a map of elevator around the world. 06:23.760 --> 06:28.160 What is quite peculiar about this software is that it doesn't quite make sense to deploy more 06:28.160 --> 06:33.920 than ones per country, because the point is that it becomes a central repository of information 06:33.920 --> 06:40.080 about your government, so we obviously have the French instance that I'm part of the team of 06:40.800 --> 06:47.840 the UK one, which is the original one. There's a few more around the EU. Again, the QR code 06:47.840 --> 06:56.160 will link through the page that I used to build this map. There's an EU level instance that 06:56.880 --> 07:03.280 gets information from the EU instances, Parliament and Council and so on. Germany, 07:03.280 --> 07:08.080 five-dimensional, you might know them if you live there. Austria and the US have like 07:08.160 --> 07:13.760 other open source software that does the same thing, that do the same thing. Then Mexico and Brazil 07:13.760 --> 07:20.880 have actually like state-operated portals, so they've actually done the work and taken care of 07:20.880 --> 07:28.320 this by themselves. What is a bug in your government look like? Most of the time it's money, 07:28.320 --> 07:33.440 because the most obvious thing is like easily quantifiable. It could be money that disappears, 07:33.440 --> 07:38.800 money that has gone the wrong way, money that seems to be missing, and yeah, we don't know what's 07:38.800 --> 07:44.000 happened with it, and so you can like be interested in understanding what is going on there. 07:44.000 --> 07:50.080 Decisions the same way, like why do they decide to build X in this place or that other place, 07:50.080 --> 07:54.880 or how did it become about this decision? Those are kind of things that you can like 07:54.880 --> 07:59.600 figure out with access to information. Sometimes it's just missing data, so you would just 07:59.600 --> 08:04.800 like to have some documents, some statistics, about something that you can't find on like 08:04.800 --> 08:11.440 an open data portal, for instance. So actual bugs that have been found through access to information, 08:11.440 --> 08:16.720 again, this is a link to like a whole bunch of stories, news media, and so on that are quite 08:16.720 --> 08:22.320 interesting. But I think my favorite one is the post office horizon scandal, so this is in the UK 08:22.400 --> 08:31.440 a few years ago, big court case against people running the post offices, the local post offices, 08:32.240 --> 08:38.320 allegedly they were stealing money, and the court found a bunch of people guilty, 08:38.320 --> 08:44.320 find some of them since some others to prison for stealing money. But there was one woman in the 08:44.320 --> 08:50.480 country who knew one of the people involved in this scandal, and she didn't believe that he was 08:50.560 --> 08:57.760 actually guilty of this, and so she used FY in this case to go and dig deeper into the problem. 08:57.760 --> 09:02.960 And she found documents that had not been released through the court case that basically showed 09:02.960 --> 09:09.440 that horizon, which is the software that they were using to run post offices, was basically full 09:09.440 --> 09:15.600 of bugs, and those bugs were converted in money that appeared to be missing. So all these people 09:15.600 --> 09:20.960 had been sent to prison because of bugs that they were not responsible for. And through access 09:20.960 --> 09:26.480 to information, she was able to reverse this court decision and debug this problem. So I find it 09:26.480 --> 09:31.280 really cool because to me this is very similar to, you know, oh this software is not doing what I want, 09:31.280 --> 09:37.600 I go and get her fixed the bug and now everybody's better for it, and this is exactly that. 09:37.760 --> 09:46.160 Right now in France, we are just about to start the Electoral Campaign for Mayors. We're going 09:46.160 --> 09:53.680 to elect 36,000 Mayors, and about a year ago the mayor of Paris had to release her expenses, 09:53.680 --> 10:00.320 and there was a lot of stuff in there that was social movement towards more transparency. 10:02.240 --> 10:06.960 There's plenty of other things, but like videos surveillance in Belgium, they've like dug into 10:07.120 --> 10:12.720 official documents, procurements, information, and so on to understand the scope and how prevalent 10:13.280 --> 10:20.480 video surveillance is in this very country. There's also things at the EU level where people 10:20.480 --> 10:25.200 and journalists in particular have been digging into the amount of lobbying that has been done 10:25.200 --> 10:34.800 by chemical corporations to block regulations to protect us and our health against PFAS, 10:34.880 --> 10:39.680 the forever chemicals that cause all sorts of cancers and so on, and it's quite interesting to see 10:40.240 --> 10:43.680 how hard these companies are lobbying against protection. 10:45.040 --> 10:49.200 Things that are a bit harder to track, there's a bunch of exceptions to the laws, and again this 10:49.200 --> 10:56.080 is going to vary a lot country to country. GDPR for all the great stuff that it does is also 10:56.080 --> 11:02.560 used by some people to block access to information, and it's kind of like the code 11:02.640 --> 11:08.160 for the application if you want, but then there's things like business secrecy or national security. 11:08.160 --> 11:13.600 This is like permission denied, you can't have this information, and the call story usually ends 11:13.600 --> 11:19.280 there unless you're like very, very persistent. Things that might be interesting to this people 11:19.280 --> 11:24.880 to people in this room, you might be curious to find out how much your local government is paying 11:24.880 --> 11:32.560 to let's say Microsoft to have their office 365 license and so things. This is the kind of thing 11:32.560 --> 11:38.960 that you can find through access to information. You could request the source code for your 11:38.960 --> 11:44.640 city's website or some application that they're using to interact with you. Some people are also 11:44.640 --> 11:51.520 using this to find the privacy assessments to understand how personal data is handled by your 11:51.520 --> 11:58.720 government, so by some application that they're making available to the public. If you look at 11:58.720 --> 12:05.040 beyond software, basically anything that the state, the government, the public service takes care 12:05.040 --> 12:11.200 of is fair game, so environmental information in particular is like the good candidate, the laws 12:11.200 --> 12:16.400 tend to be stronger around environmental information, so you have more transparency, you can't have 12:16.480 --> 12:22.240 more transparency, but anything like health, education, transportation, security, you name it, 12:22.240 --> 12:25.680 if the state has something to do with it, usually you can find some information. 12:27.280 --> 12:32.960 And why matters? So I really believe that our rights only wear out if you don't use them, 12:34.000 --> 12:40.000 and so it's important to use, keep using them, keep asking questions, requesting documentation, 12:40.960 --> 12:47.600 because if you don't, what happens is that nobody knows about these rights, these freedoms, 12:47.600 --> 12:51.520 they're not being used, and on the receiving end, the government says, well, you know, 12:52.240 --> 12:56.080 people don't really care about this, because look, nobody's asking any questions, so we can 12:56.080 --> 13:03.440 probably get rid of those laws and these freedoms altogether. And I think right now with the 13:03.440 --> 13:10.160 rise of AI with fake news just about everywhere, having access to the source code of how things 13:10.160 --> 13:18.400 are actually operating is a good way to understand what is truly happening and may be counter a 13:18.400 --> 13:23.440 little bit of the distrust in government and in society in general, and I think it's in a way 13:23.440 --> 13:28.800 a way to defend our democracies, just like you're devoting, you can ask for questions and 13:28.800 --> 13:36.240 like, look at the source. I think I'll stop here. Thank you again, bunch of ways to get in touch. 13:36.240 --> 13:41.280 I'll have a telly's to software. Medada is our French platform. If you're looking for the one for 13:41.280 --> 13:47.040 your country, that QR code will link you to a page that shows the various instances of that 13:47.040 --> 13:54.240 of a telly. If you're in Germany, Hagenstadt, dotty, if you're in Austria, of Hagenstadt, RT, I think, 13:54.400 --> 14:00.080 and in the US is called Macrock. And that's it for me. Thanks a lot. I have one minute for questions. 14:02.080 --> 14:07.680 No, I'll be here actually. Thank you. Do you also keep track of the latent scene? 14:08.720 --> 14:13.760 Yeah, we don't track latency of how long you haven't had a government, but we track latency of 14:14.960 --> 14:21.440 so all the metadata, at least in France, we try to make the the corpus of metadata publicly available. 14:21.440 --> 14:28.560 So if you can't find it, just ping me here. We can find it. We have ways to replicate that across countries, 14:28.560 --> 14:32.400 but this is like part of the developments for future use and improvements.