Introduction: Alex Haché

Dear all,

 My name is Alex Haché and I am a researcher on ICT for social and political
transformation. I have a PhD in economics focused on social innovation
produced by the use of Internet and Social Computing by civil society and
social movements. I recently ended a post doctoral fellowship for the
Institute of Prospective Technological Studies (European Commission - DG
JRC) on the topic of “eInclusion policies and social inclusion with ICT”
based on several research projects regarding the practices with ICT of
immigrants,
youth at risk and third sector organizations. In parallel to this formal
education, I have been involved since 2002 in many informal learning and
activist research settings, receiving or providing myself training in the
use and design of free software.

 I am also member of an Internet project related to the Federated Social Web
entitled “Lorea”. I voluntarily contribute to this project by providing
workshops, trainings, presentations, and also by administrating one of the
federated social networking sites lodged by the project (https://n-1.cc).

Lorea, is an initiative for the development of free, secured, federated and
self managed social networks for civil society. It is organized by an
informal collective that was started in 2009 by individuals concerned with
security and privacy issues in the age of surveillance, control, and data
mining. Lorea implements and develops tools (wikis, blogs, etherpad,
calendars, task management, mailing lists, forums, microblogging, files
sharing, etc.) in order to facilitate collaboration between individuals/
collectives and the dissemination and generation of collective memory. Besides,
Lorea actively researches and implements available federation protocols.
Lorea is also committed to the implementation of technologies such as the
GPG (GNU Privacy Guard), which allows the contents circulating through the
networks to be encrypted. More information about the project can be find at
: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/7826/lorea/

 Because of my involvement in this project I am developing
independentresearch on the potential of the “open social
web” and the “federated social web” for the self-organization of civil
society. In order to achieve this I am currently mapping the state of the
art of initiatives currently involved in developing the FSW and I am
analysing how collectives are using available federated networks for
self-organization. One of my main challenges consists in
designingmethodologies to address the
new type of data implied by federation and to analyse this data without
monitoring the users of the social networks.

 I am really enjoying the experience of reading you and I hope to contribute
as much as possible to this group, meanwhile take care,

 Regards

Alex Haché