Various elements for the operation in this ambitious research project needed to be assembled and prepared in a team, spread over whole Europe. In the mean while the political context (EU and many others...) changed quite dramatically, as expected. Despite all efforts, EDPS wasn't able to find a new home for their pilot project "EU Voice & EU Video" in other EUIs. This meant that we, as FediVariety, had to reschedule our operation, in a way we are still able to fulfill our main objective, as described in our research project:
"The EU’s reliance on profit-driven, closed-source and ad-based social media platforms comes with significant challenges to their digital sovereignty. Dependency on these to facilitate official communication can undermine democracy and influence political opinions.
Our goal is to provide policy recommendations and comprehensive guides for public administrations, and civil society actors interested in self-hosting and alternatives. To do so, we are following the pioneering effort by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) to integrate self-hosted Fediverse instances into public administration. "EU Voice" and "EU Video" have been operating since April 2022. In this time, social.network.europa.eu has hosted 35 accounts for EU institutions, while tube.network.europa.eu provides 6 PeerTube accounts."
We're getting there... ;)
More to be published imminently.