Increasingly, proprietary online communities and social media platforms funnel people’s web experiences through practices that undermine — continue reading
Today, the European Commission has taken another step towards building a brighter digital future for Europe by selecting Dutch company Open Social to create the online community solution for their Europa Communities Platform (ECP) initiative led by the European Commission Directorate-General for Informatics (DG DIGIT). The Europa Communities Platform is an initiative to spearhead the adoption of open-source tools and technologies across Commission departments and EU institutions.
Increasingly, proprietary online communities and social media platforms funnel people’s web experiences through practices that undermine the digital rights and freedom of people. Open Social’s guiding vision is to promote a pro-privacy, anti-monopoly and open web that inspires trusted connections and collaboration. This vision aligns with the digital future that Europa Communities Platform and the European Commission are creating, with a focus on empowering and including every citizen, strengthening the potential of every business, and meeting global challenges with their core values.
The first Europa Communities Platform platform will go live this week. This inaugural platform will serve the Europe Climate Pact, an initiative focused on bringing people, communities, and organizations together to participate in climate action across Europe. The European Climate Pact invites everyone to participate in building a greener Europe on the 29th of June during the #EUClimatePact Day of Action. In the coming months, additional new platforms will be launched and existing communities migrated to Open Social.
Open-source technology for Europa Communities Platform
The European Commission has set its strategic mandate for Europe’s Digital Decade with the ambition to be digitally sovereign in an open and interconnected world. Integral to this mandate is pursuing digital policies that empower people and businesses to seize a human-centered, sustainable, and more prosperous digital future. As the world’s leading open-source community software provider, Open Social is the ideal partner to drive the Commission’s mandate of promoting widespread institutional adoption of open-source technology across the continent. The Europa Communities Platform initiative is being developed in partnership with Open Social.
The role of online communities is crucial to building this future, facilitating free knowledge exchange and creating connections between institutions and individuals without infringing on their privacy, personal data or digital rights. Open-source technology is already playing — and will play an increasingly important — role in achieving a more inclusive, fair, and transparent technological future in Europe and beyond its borders.
Safety and privacy in an interconnected world
The aim of the OEC initiative is to create an open-source, secure and personalized software solution that will allow European institutions to set up their own state-of-the-art online community platforms and connect and engage their members. The initiative promises to create more connections, engagement, and collaboration without the pervasive privacy and data-rights concerns associated with proprietary software or public social media platforms.
Open Social’s rich suite of community management and member engagement features makes it an ideal platform for OEC, as well as the software’s inherent flexibility that will allow institutions to easily customize the design, layout, structures and branding of their OEC platforms. A number of European organizations, such as the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the European Training Foundation, are already using Open Social to connect and engage their community members.
To find out more about what Open Social can do for your organization, you can easily schedule a one-on-one demo and we can show you all the features (and also what Open Social would look like branded for your organization!)
