Status Report 1/3: “Mapping the Landscape on Fediverse Use in Public Administration”
Hereby FediVariety proudly presents you in 3 blog posts the actual status of our research project regarding the integration of the Fediverse in the EU administration, based on the EDPS pilot project "EU Voice-Video". Presentation of the preliminary report is to be foreseen in selected theaters only. Stay tuned for further updates!
For the initial research task (1 of 3), we successfully mapped Fediverse adoption within the European Union public administration. We navigated European institutions and utilised the EU regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 (which specifies that citizens can request access to existing documents) to request information from 21 bodies and receive 136 relevant documents from 9 institutions, including meeting minutes, email communication, and strategy papers. This allowed us to clearly map the interactions of stakeholders in the EDPS pilot project “EU Voice-Video”.
Our methodology involved identifying interview candidates, preparing guides, and initiating requests. While we aimed for broad coverage using snowball sampling, many interviewees preferred anonymity. We utilised the asktheeu.org platform to reach additional institutions, encountering varying levels of responsiveness and identity verification requirements.
Ultimately, we analysed the received documents to identify key actors and employed open source tools such as Monica CMS for contact management, Mattermost for internal communication, and CryptPad for collaborative work. This all provided us with the foundations for our next task; “In-depth Interviews” in order to be suitable for qualitative coding and analysis of all interviews.
These are the actual steps we took in our initial task, titled “Mapping the Landscape on Fediverse Use in Public Administration”:
- Research and list organisations to interview and issue FOIA requests
- Prepare standardised interview guides and issue initial FOIA and interview requests
- Analyse requests, consolidate and integrating results in planning for task 2 & 3