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Now, it's my very great pleasure to give the word over for the talk,
Dear MEP, Free Software Infrastructure for Online Campaigning in the EU.
And please give a hand of applause to our speakers.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you that you join us late at night.
We are very happy that we can do a little bit of an introduction and
announcement to the free software that we are developing.
My name is Thomas Lohninger, I'm Executive Director of AP Center Works and
the Boston Digital Rights Organization and also Vice President of EDGIE,
the umbrella of almost all digital rights NGOs working in the European Union.
And I'm here joined today with Tim Weber.
>> Right, I'm Tim or Sky.
I don't have as many titles, I'm a freelance software developer.
And I've been around this whole chaos family since 2005 or something like that.
So yeah.
>> Great, yeah, let's get started.
There's a little bit of theoretical overview and then we will show you a preview.
And mind you that there is also access to the tool available for
everyone here at camp.
The URL will be announced later and we also had handouts.
But first let's explain a little bit why we are here.
Can you turn to the next slide?
Yeah, exactly.
So what's the theory of change?
Why are we doing this?
Our basic idea is that political decisions worsen when politicians are left alone.
Particularly with difficult things like internet regulation.
Technology regulation is inherently difficult.
And we believe that our community, that the hacker community,
that people that are actually living in the internet have important things to say.
And that in today's world, particularly young people and
people that are very much connected with the internet should be heard
when politicians are making laws about technology and about the internet.
And our tool tries to bridge that divide.
Our tool tries to connect citizens and
average users with their political decision makers.
In our case, members of the European Parliament, MEPs, so those people that we
elect every four years that sit in the European Parliament in Brussels and
in Strasbourg and make these very important decisions.
And those 705 MEPs come from all countries of the EU.
Those people are elected by us.
They should be accountable to us.
And in the way the European Union works, whenever a law is made,
the parliamentarians have their say.
And there is a complex system between Brussels and Strasbourg and
various committees where every law has to be voted on various stages until you have
a final piece of text that is the official position of the European Parliament.
And it doesn't matter if you go back to the softer patterns from the 90s or
the GDPR or net neutrality copyright.
It is always the case that we usually have our best chance to adhere to civil
rights, to enshrine fundamental rights in the law with those 705
members of European Parliament.
Those are the people that we vote for, not some government officials from
ministries, and that's why they are our best chance to have future proof
legislation adopted for half a billion people in the biggest market in the world,
which is the EU.
And you know that the EU often sets global standards, so we really believe
that we need to look closely for the quality of those decisions.
And what we did in the past, in 2013-14, with safetyinternet.eu,
was that we sent faxes to the members of the European Parliament.
Back then, it was the beautiful case that when you send a fax to an MEP,
they all have their office, they all have their staff, it's a physical office
they have, and in there is a multifunctional printer.
And when you send a fax to that printer, it gets printed out on paper.
And you cannot disconnect the fax without also disconnecting the printer.
So we hacked that, basically, for net neutrality back then.
And so many trees were killed in the process.
I have to say.
But this was really efficient.
I still remember the stories from liberal politicians,
FDP from Germany, where the politician was really not our friend.
But because every morning, he had a pile of paper on his desk
from citizens that wanted to have their opinion heard by this politician.
And the staffers really had this pile of paper every day,
so they couldn't ignore the citizens' opinion.
And that's also one of the reasons why we won Infrastreeding
in the European Parliament for Net Neutrality.
And then we continued on.
You all remember upload filters, Article 13 in the copyright directive.
And back in 2019, we did a similar campaign.
But because we were so successful with the faxes,
faxes are no longer available in the printer.
They are now received in Outlook.
That means they are also in the spam filter.
They are no longer a viable way to reach the politician.
Telephone still is.
And in a very hasty campaign in 2019, we actually developed a call tool
where people could call their members of European Parliament,
not just once, but also having a call subscription,
where every day you would be connected to the same politician from your country.
And it was a way for us to really make a difference.
Even allies of ours, like Marit De Schaake from the Liberal Dutch Party,
D66, said that was really helpful, but never do it again.
Because whenever we were in the office, the phone was ringing.
And whenever you are done with that one citizen, the phone would ring again.
So that was a very efficient way to reach parliamentarians in 2019.
But sadly, that software was a really ugly piece of thing
that we just developed hastily.
And it's not usable.
It was never open source because it wouldn't be something
that's stable, usable for many campaigns.
And that's why we created DRMEP.
The basic premise of this tool is that, yes, this will be disturbing.
Yes, politicians would rather prefer being left alone
with their power without hearing from their constituency.
But we believe it's time that they are accountable to their citizens
and that they need to listen to the opinions from experts.
And we all are experts here in the room.
When it comes to technology, I think all of us have valuable things
to contribute to this difficult problem of regulation of tech.
And these tools that we are developing here are commonplace in the US.
You have many tools that call Congress is one example.
In the UK, this is very common that you get connected with your member
of parliament in the House of Commons.
In the EU, this is really not something that's done.
And we would like to fill that gap.
And one thing that we do here is not just to offer a phone tool
that makes it very easy to connect with politicians.
We are also focusing on the movable middle.
In every political decision, there is a side that you've already won.
Like, let's take chat control.
You don't need to convince Patrick Breyer from the pirate party.
He is already on our side.
You will also never convince Axel Frost from the CDU, from the conservatives.
What you have to focus on, if you really want to get a majority,
is to focus on the movable middle, on those politicians that are yet left
undecided, that can still be convinced with good arguments.
If they hear from people in their own language that truly care
about the issue they have to vote upon, we believe that focusing
on that movable middle with giving people a voice is a great way
to actually increase the quality of the laws that get adopted.
And so to sum things up, what we try to solve with this tool
is to really make it easy for users to engage with the EU.
The EU is a difficult beast.
There is process, there is trust books, there are 705 MEPs.
You really have a hard time trying to even get your opinion
to the person that could theoretically vote on this.
And so we try to abstract everything that concerns the EU machinery.
You only need to care about the issue and make your own voice heard.
Of course, if you do international calls, they should usually be a cost.
Particularly if you do this seriously, there could be roaming charges
depending on the price of your mobile phone contract.
That will not be the case with our tool, because we call the user.
There is no cost at all for a citizen.
We believe that we have an obligation as providers of this tool
to really maximise the time that people are donating.
The users are volunteers, they don't get paid for that.
They care about something.
And really making the most out of the 20, 15, 30 minutes a week
that they want to contribute for an issue is our obligation.
And that's why we try to maximise the impact from every phone call.
As I said, don't call us, we call you.
And most importantly, and that's the difference to the copyright campaign
we did in 2019, this is a white label solution.
So it will be usable for these rights campaigns, but also for climate,
for migration issues, for any issue that people care about.
And that's also why we released the software under a GPL license,
because it's our belief that the path to parliament
should be as long or as short for everybody.
In a democracy, everybody should have equality
when it comes to influencing politicians and decision makers.
And I think that's, yeah, there's also concept note.
We haven't published this yet, but that's freely available
for people that want to engage.
It gives a good outline of what we try to achieve,
what also future development steps would be.
But let's leave it at the theoretical level,
and I would love to show you the demonstration
of the tool that we already have.
Right, yeah, so that's the demo.
So this is where things can actually go wrong, right?
So as you can see, I'll just...
We have handouts for the people who are there.
That's the URL, it's live right now.
It's chatcontrol.dermep.eu.
Just a small announcement, this is live and accessible for the camp right now.
We will probably, like, password protect it later on at some point.
So if you're watching a recording of this and you can't access the site,
yeah, then it's over.
So what you see here is basically the page you're seeing
when you first open the tool.
You can switch the language.
So right now we have it available in German, English, and Swedish.
And as I said, here's where things go wrong, right?
Let me just refresh this real quick.
Let's hope we have an internet connection here.
Internet conferences are prone to weak internet connection.
But the thing is, I have a local instance running as well,
so I can just use that, right?
OK, so yeah, you can switch the language,
and also there's a geolocation built in.
So whenever you access the site for the first time,
it will detect which country you are coming from.
This is all done without third-party services,
so we really focus a lot on privacy here.
So you can see there's a lot of countries in the EU,
and I can simply say, OK, I'm from the Netherlands,
and it will suggest a member of parliament from there to me.
So this is basically what the system thinks that...
or one of the persons that the system thinks
that would be beneficial to call.
If you don't like calling this particular person,
you can always press this refresh button,
and it will suggest someone different.
But you can also say, if you like...
You can also use the search function right now.
If you just click it, it will show you every MEP from the Netherlands,
but you can also search for your favorite politician
or something like that.
And just select that one.
So we also have here a lot of social media profiles
and other ways to contact these persons.
Also, the phone numbers, for example,
there's a calendar built in
because they switch between Brussels and Strasbourg.
So the system will always give you the right number
for where they are right now.
And, yeah, if I just have this person,
I would...
If I want to call Axel Forze right now,
I could say, "Call now."
So...
And here we are at the point
where you have to give us your phone number.
That's the only piece of identification from you that we get.
And, I mean, without your phone number, we can't connect you,
so that's fair game, I think.
So it just enters some kind of phone number.
And I...
Yes, I have read and accepted the privacy policy.
By the way, we already have a working privacy policy
if you're interested in that.
And...
So it's...
I click it, it sends me a code on my mobile phone.
"Oh, yeah, all right, my code is...
"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, of course."
And...
I verify this. So, yeah.
We are now successfully verified with this number.
And we can now start a call.
So what would happen in this instance,
not right now,
is that our phone would ring
and we would pick up the phone
and some nice voice, maybe of Thomas or someone else,
would say, "OK, hi, this is DRMEP.
"Would you like to be connected to Axle Force?"
And then you could, like, press 1 or 2 or something like that,
and you would be connected to the office of Axle Force.
So let's click Start Call,
and we'll call you right away.
And as you can see, there are talking points right here.
So ignore this for a moment.
This is just the mock-up.
So this is already showing what you would see
if the call were over.
So we have a lot of talking points
which you can scroll through during your call
to aid you in...
Yeah.
In talking to the person.
And after the call,
you are able to give some feedback,
like, "Were you able to convince the person?"
Let's click Yes with Axle Force. Come on, let's say.
Axle Force voted against...
..terminology, like, the thing that just reclassified
"call power" as green.
He was actually with Fridays for Future.
So Axle Force is convincing on some issues.
Let's not give hope up on it.
And the beauty of that here is that, of course,
the system is learning.
If enough people have said,
"Yeah, I have convinced this politician,"
they will actually move to the green corner
and be out of the movable middle.
So the system is actually learning.
You don't need to divide up with Axle Sheets,
the members of parliament.
Everybody can just use that tool.
And you are always connected to the person
who is most likely to be influenced,
who can make a difference,
and the system always learns
from the users that are using it.
Right. So you can give additional feedback
if you want to, and we just click "Submit".
So we're back on the page.
We could instantly choose another person,
and let's show us the second feature.
We can also call later.
So what's "call later"?
Call later allows you to enter a schedule.
Maybe you're like, "OK, I have time each Tuesday
at around, I don't know, 13.30 to talk to a politician,
because that's right after my lunch break.
I am in a good mood,
and I would like to talk to a politician.
And on Thursday, my lunch break is basically on 1 o'clock
or something like that.
So you can enter different times for different workdays,
or you can just leave it like that,
and you can say "Confirm", and basically that's it.
So what would happen right now is the system would call you
on Tuesday at 13.30 or around 13.30,
and ask you, "Do you have time right now?
Do you want to be connected to Berg Lars Patrik?"
And yeah.
And the reason for that is that we know that,
particularly for nerds, maybe for everybody,
speaking with foreign people is not easy.
We know that this is a high ask, that actually picking up the phone,
speaking with politicians is a big favour we're asking from people.
But those people that are willing to do this once,
most likely will do it again.
And by maximising this slow conversion rate of those people
that truly care, that we want to speak with their parliamentarian,
and letting them do it again, maybe get really good at it,
that's also a beauty of this talk.
Again, we are nudging people, whenever we call you,
there will be the option "Press 9" and the subscription is cancelled.
And as I said, there's a privacy policy already in place,
the GDPR compliant, yes, we adhere to the law,
and we are very strict with the data that we process.
Most phone numbers are hashed and encrypted,
only in active call subscriptions where we need the number to connect to,
then we have it actually in the database.
But we try to be as privacy preserving and minimalistic as possible with all of that.
And as we are out of time, I'd just briefly like to say before I go to Q&A,
that this tool right now will be applied for the chat control campaign,
we are still in development, we are also here to talk with the community,
to get your feedback and your input, maybe also get some help
with testing, penetration testing, development and so forth.
But at this stage, it's really something that we, after chat control has passed,
hope to release in this HPPL license, that we have something that's forever truly available
for the community to engage with MVPs.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for your talk.
So, we have decided beforehand that you are going to do the Q&A offline outside of the tent,
because we are out of time here for this stage,
but these two speakers will still be available for your questions,
just we won't be using our kind angel team back there for the technology there.
So, thank you all for coming here.
Please give another round of applause to our speakers.
[ Applause ]
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