Integrating Fediverse into Public Administration, EU Voice-Video case study

The EU’s reliance on profit-driven, closed-source and ad-based social media platforms comes with significant challenges to digital sovereignty. Dependency on these to facilitate official communication can undermine democracy and influence political opinions.

The goal of this project is to provide policy recommendations and comprehensive guides for public administrations, and civil society actors interested in self-hosting and alternatives. A starting point of the projects is the pioneering effort by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) to integrate self-hosted Fediverse instances into public administration ("EU Voice" and "EU Video").

The project will map the landscape of Fediverse use and the surrounding policy considerations in the EU's public administration by issuing informal inquiries with stakeholders, via Freedom of Information Requests (FOIA) requests of involved institutions. The project will also conduct in-depth interviews to elicit the affordances and limitations in operational activities to set up and maintain Fediverse instances and the impact on organizational structures and existing social media outreach strategies.