LaSuite.coop: make a common around the DINUM Suite
Walid: Welcome to Projets Libres, LinuxFr.org’s podcast about free software, digital commons and open data.
I’m Walid Nouh and today, we’re going to talk about a very topical subject these days. You may have already heard of it if you live in France or if you follow the French news a little. We’re going to talk about LaSuite.coop. We will explain to you right after, what it is about.
And with me to talk about this fascinating subject, I have two people. Bertille Mazari, co-founder and CEO of LaSuite.coop, and Timothée Gosselin , who is co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of LaSuite.coop.
So, both of you, welcome to Projets Libres. I hope you are well, despite this stifling heat.
Timothée: Hi, thank you.
Bertille: Hello Walid.
Timothée: A little warm, but we’re very happy to be here.
Presentation of the guests
Walid: Very happy to have you. We’ll start by introducing you for the listeners. Who are you? When did you discover free software, the digital commons? Bertille to you the honor, I leave the floor to you.
Bertille: I am indeed Bertille Mazari, originally, I came from the social sciences. That is to say, I studied political studies at the EHESS, and I did a research thesis on participatory democracy, more on the philosophical than the practical aspect.
And at the end of my master’s degree, I had to do an internship and as a result, I arrived at Open Source Politics, a company that does digital participatory democracy and that offers and deploys citizen participation platforms based on free software called Decidim, and which is intended for the entire community or institution wishing to engage in digital citizen participation processes.
My role, initially, was above all to support local authorities and institutions in the co-design of these approaches. So, local authorities such as Marseille, Lyon or Toulouse, which want to set up participatory budgets or citizens’ assemblies.
And there is also the institutional side, such as the National Assembly, for example. I think that the Duplomb law can speak to many people. In fact, the Duplomb law petition was on Decidim, a platform that we deployed within Open Source Politics, and it was my first encounter with free software via Decidim and thanks to Open Source Politics.
So, at the beginning, I was quite a novice, I didn’t necessarily understand all the underpinnings, everything that it was articulating, all the community that existed, pre-existed within Decidim.
I think there’s a podcast that has already been filmed with Valentin Chaput that tells the story of Decidim. I invite you to go and listen to it because it is quite rich and interesting on the way in which this digital commons has been built and also perpetuated over the years because of its independence from the municipality: how do we take a common out of the public to have a community and build over the years a free software and not just open source dependent on a public service.
It will overlap quite a bit with what we want to do with LaSuite.coop, it will echo the issues that are presented to us.
And so, yes, to come back to my knowledge of free software, yes, it was through Decidim that I got to know it and then, I integrated and I started to be curious about different ecosystems, different software. We had Metabase, then we had Grist, and now the tools of LaSuite.coop.
I started to acculturate myself and to take everything into account how it worked, did it exist, and we can come back to that in more detail, but I’ll leave it to Timothée maybe.
Walid: yes, just actually, season 2, episode 5, the episode with Valentin Chaput from Open Source Politics talking about Decidim. I certainly wanted to say a few words about it at one time or another, because the subject came up when we were preparing this episode, but Timothée to you.
Timothée: Yes, I, Timothée, in fact, am part of a cooperative called Indie Hosters, one of the founding companies of LaSuite.coop. I’ve been in the free software world for a little over 10 years. We are part of the CHATONS collective and we offer online collaboration tools when we host in SaaS mode.
Me, basically, what brought me into this world, I was always a little curious about this notion of sharing knowledge, access to culture, to knowledge, should be something open. It’s always something that has driven me and the tinkering side, I like to get my hands dirty.
I’m not a tech guy at the core, I have a more business school profile. But here’s the thing, I liked to tinker, I had installed a Linux, I had started to deploy a forum for a project I had launched a few years ago. And I really got into it actually, me basically, as a customer of Indie Hosters. So, initially, I was a client of this project.
And one thing leading to another, I made friends with Pierre [Ozoux-Krebber] the founder, and I found myself working for Indie Hosters and running the shop for more than ten years, as I said, always with Pierre and the team has grown since then.
But here’s the thing, the thing that really drives me in this free software thing is the possibility of being able to get your hands on it, to be able to appropriate the project, the software, divert it, improve it.
And for me, knowledge and making it accessible to everyone is what drives me in this world.
What is LaSuite.coop
Walid : Very good. I suggest that we start by defining what Lasuite.coop is, because there are several follow-ups: there is the Suite of the DINUM, the territorial sequence, the suite.coop. For people who might be a little lost with these three identical names, what are we talking about when we talk about Lasuite.coop? Bertille?
Bertille : LaSuite.coop, it’s a cooperative of collective interest. There are two predominant models in cooperatives: SCOPs and SCICs.
As a result, we are a SCIC, a cooperative of collective interest as I said, which is made up of different colleges, including that of service operators. It brings together several companies and mainly cooperatives that offer services around the tools of the DINUM’s LaSuite.
One of the most prominent service operators is Indie Hosters, which offers to deploy, host and support the tools initially developed in part by the Interministerial Digital Directorate, i.e. the DINUM. I don’t know if we go into detail now about the DINUM?
Walid : No, we’ll talk about it right after, but rather if you can explain the project in a little more detail and what services you offer.
Bertille : LaSuite.coop, so it’s a suite of tools, hence the name, the suite, which can evoke a suite of collaborative tools, but also a desire to prepare for the future, therefore to prepare for the future in the sense of making ourselves more autonomous and independent of proprietary software that pre-exists and that dominates our daily practices and our work practices.
So, in fact, we offer an office suite that is composed of open source and free software that goes from messaging to collaborative note-taking, email, calendar, video.
And so, in fact, the objective is to offer a complete suite that allows you to get rid of, in fact, to make possible an alternative to the office suites of Google and Microsoft which are the most widely used.
Walid : Who is it for? Do you have a target audience that you want to reach first or not?
Bertille : We have different target audiences that are not necessarily more preponderant than each other.
We have the local authorities that we want to address, there are quite a few who are currently becoming aware of the issues of sovereignty and their dependence on certain proprietary tools and companies.
So, there are local authorities, companies, but also associations and collectives, any company from the SSE in particular, which want to change their digital roadmap and that we can address.
Walid : Does that mean that my sports club could use your services?
Bertille : yes, completely.
Timothée : yes, that’s the idea. Today, I think we’re a bit expensive for small orgas, and that’s kind of the challenge we’re trying to develop too, it’s finding ways so that we can pool resources.
Today, we offer dedicated instances, so everyone has their own world, their own domain, it’s your own space, so for at least ten people. From a resource point of view, we’re going to deploy a lot of resources for not a lot of people, so that it respects the ecological pact, etc., it’s still something that we try to take into account.
And the idea is to find ways for associations, collectives to come together and pool their resources together and make them a bit of a common within the commons, in a way.
And the idea is that the more we succeed in mobilizing the most collectives and people, the more our costs will be able to fall.
There you have it, there is this whole issue of pooling and trying to… to make it more and more accessible.
The history of the DINUM Suite and its scope
Walid : Let’s start now, if you don’t mind, to present the Suite itself, the DINUM project.
So the suite is a suite of tools that has been developed by the DINUM. What does it cover within the DINUM? That is to say, is the functional scope of the DINUM suite the same as the one you are proposing, or do you have additional bricks or things less? That’s the first thing.
And secondly, can you explain a little bit the history of the DINUM Suite, and also, well, afterwards, we’ll see later, how did you fit into that? First thing about the perimeter perhaps.
Timothée : Today, LaSuite.coop, it’s pretty much completely equivalent to what the DINUM suite offers. We just have a little extra thing about passwords.
Email, we don’t use the same tool in fact: in fact it’s a bit complicated, what you have the ANCT suite and you have the DINUM following. So the ANCT is for local authorities, for public officials, and even then, they don’t use exactly the same tools, especially on email.
Now, we are starting with the solution that is the Suite of the ANCT for email, but overall, LaSuite.coop, it is the suite that public officials use, but for all those who are not public officials, that we use the same tools.
Marginally, we changed just the password part as I said. In the long term, we are not closing the door to adding tools that will not necessarily be in the future.
And there you have it, it’s really about covering all the needs of an information system for a company, a community, as mentioned just before.
To put it simple at the beginning: there you go, it’s really the same, we deploy it for the private and the public who are not public servants.
I think that even within the DINUM suite, they have a bit of trouble clarifying exactly their positioning. Now, they’re going to clarify a lot of things, but I think they’re still looking for themselves a little bit.
And that’s also where the community has a role to play in defining together what we want in this Suite. And it is also one of the ambitions of the DINUM to make it a real commonality, to have a community that takes advantage of these tools, that contributes, etc.
In any case, the functional scope is really about collaboration and getting out of Microsoft 365 is the main issue.
To do a little history of the rest from our point of view. It’s not the DINUM, but how we perceived and experienced it. For the details, there is the great article from Framasoft, the review of the critics of La Suite which includes the history of the Suite, but also of all the state’s projects in the digital sector. I strongly recommend that you say that it is very complete, very detailed and well sourced.
But basically, the rest happened three years ago, a little more, three years I think. There was a project called the digital backpack of the public official. it was a small digital project and in fact we at that time Indie Hosters, we were hosting this project for the DINUM. We managed a Kubernetes cluster for this project. And at some point, maybe three years ago, maybe four years ago, there was the team for the Suite that was being put together, especially with Samuel Paccoud, the same who talks about it very well on A la French.
Walid : I’ll put the link in the transcript anyway.
Timothée : who also tells a little bit of this whole story. to arrive with this ambition of… not really replace Microsoft, but it’s a bit like stripping it down in a way and offering new uses too. Because they had this strategy of not competing directly because you can’t get to the level of a 365 suite. which was really thought of as totally integrated, so integrated that you’re locked up in fact too.
So then they said to themselves, we’re going to take small bricks and we’re going to offer new uses, typically Docs, here you go a little bit out of the thing, we’re going to do online office, you’re more sure of note-taking, like Notion or… of the pad plus more, Grist which brings something new compared to Excel, well it’s more on no-code, low-code etc. So there you have it, they have taken a lot of small uses like that, they said to themselves “we are going to offer these tools”.
We’re kind of there at the beginning because we were managing this old project and we found ourselves having to offer the infrastructure to install the tools for the suite. And we were also able to discuss at the beginning to also advise them a little about us, our return as a host, what was needed, what was lacking in the open source ecosystem on these tools.
And so, little by little, they replaced, that’s it, they started by taking tools that worked well like Grist, re-developing certain bricks like Docs, or Visio, while still relying on existing libraries. it’s ProseMirror, BlockNoteJS, there are libraries that exist and are supported by communities. The same goes for Visio, it presses LiveKit, underneath the WebRTC brick, it’s Pion, it’s quite modern technologies. And so they took a little bit of different bricks like that to propose, as Samuel says so well in his video, the tapas strategy. They offer you lots of small dishes there for your uses and it took off great.
Little by little, you have tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of agents who have started to use these tools. They have gradually improved the catalogue. The thing I didn’t talk about is that there is still Tchap who has been there for much longer. I think it’s, yes I could say about dates but 2019 something like that I think, we can check but Tchap was already there before, so Tchap is the instant messaging part which is based on Matrix and a fork of the Element client. The biggest project in the end.
Use by use, need by need, they have replaced little by little. bricks that you can find in Microsoft 365 or other collaborative tools.
Walid : I will also link to a FOSDEM conference where they explain the dynamics of collaboration with the underlying bookstores.
Timothée : There is a lot of criticism around the Suite, where they have been pointed out a lot for reinventing the wheel, for not relying on existing projects. But in fact that’s what they do, as Samuel explained, it’s easier sometimes to start with low-level blocks to build your app, rather than having a totally finished app that you’re going to want to customize, to be forced to fork, so it’s difficult to pick up the thread with the initial project. But here’s the thing, they’re trying to really collaborate with existing communities and developments that have already been done.
And here’s what I wanted to say about the Suite: what’s important to understand is that it’s a pretty major paradigm shift. Well, I’m fascinated by this project, well it’s crazy what happens to a public actor who said to himself: “Ok, I’m going to stop buying off the shelf. I’m not going to go through a big IT services company to do my development, with all the shortcomings that we can know. And we’re going to set up small, ultra-agile teams and we’re going to do it ourselves based on the needs of our users, our agents, with product teams that are attentive to the needs and the necessary developments.
And there you have it, this public actor who, here, contributes to a digital commons, not a business software of the State either, but a software that you can use for the general public. And as a result, you can develop a community around it. And that’s what we’re aiming for and what we’re doing with LaSuite.coop is to integrate into this ecosystem and really do what we’ve been talking about for years in the free software or commons community, which is this idea of having public-private-common collaborations.
And there, we touch on this thing which is quite incredible.
Walid : It is also the desire, if I have understood correctly, to internalize a certain number of competences within the State.
Timothée : It’s going towards that, so this will is fragile.
It’s complicated because what happens next crystallizes so many debates on both sides: people like us who are ultra-fascinated and who want to play the game completely, as well as other actors who are rather against the idea that the state can be independent in this part of development and operate its services.
They sail… We are on a balance, we are walking on a small ridge.
And this is the challenge that the DINUM is working on: to create this common to say to private actors: “Have you done this work.” But yes, there is this desire to be able to be more autonomous.
And I think that’s where, finally, Samuel Paccoud brought a lot of this vision of small agile teams, a lot of autonomy over the devs who are competent, and the feedback with the users.
You manage to prototype and put applications into production quite quickly, while relying, of course, on existing bricks, without completely reinventing the wheel.
Walid : So you’ve been following the project from the start and so you’ve had discussions from the start about the DINUM’s wishes, but also what you’ve been doing with it since the beginning: you say: “Would it be really great to take this and make it available to the public?”
Timothée : I’m going to go back a little bit on how we came to create LaSuite.coop.
As I said, I, Indie Hosters, have been doing this for 10 years, as CHATON. We’re happy, but it’s a bit of a tech project that has fun and tries to help collectives, associations, small businesses, etc. We’ve been doing pretty well for the last 10 years, but we found a bit of frustration in staying in a very technical project and rather also sysadmins. So, we’re not devs, so when we have to debug there, when we have to make improvements, etc., we’re a little limited.
We try to hurt you and the whole issue in our field is also support and people, because when you talk about migration, when you talk about changing habits, it involves information, accompaniment, support, etc. We try to do it as best we can, but we are a small team and we struggled a little bit. So, we said to ourselves that we have to be able to join forces with other players who do this well.
That’s how we met Yaal who was also CHATON, more of a dev company, Open Source Politics of which Bertille is a part, which is more on the consulting, support, etc. part, and other companies like Algoo which does email. And as a result, everyone with their own expertise. And the idea was rather to create a mega-structure, we federate between players and we use our resources to offer a product together.
There have already been these reflections for quite some time and now, you have the rest popping up.
And you have great tools that work really well, that are modern, that also get us out of this frustration that we had in open source of “ok the project is open source, but I still depend on a company that owns the project and it’s the company that holds the hand under the roadmap”. It’s its economic survival that will make the life of the project, even if there are plenty of great companies in open source.
You’re not in this common thing, you know.
So you have all these elements that intersect and suddenly, we said to ourselves: “Ok, there, the line is drawn, the rest, the tools are great, we have the right team, we’re going to call ourselves LaSuite.coop and we’re going to take it for the private and public market, in any case, all those who are not public employees. And we’re going to do it in the form of a cooperative of collective interest, because if we have a shared governance with our users, all those who niche the service, we really make a commonality.”
Walid : Bertille, I’ll give you the floor but just before I find that there are a lot of parallels with the way we… Well anyway, when I started in Open Source, we had a lot of community projects with., we called it IT services, but anyway with ESNs, people who were doing services, potentially who paid developers to improve the system. We are no longer in the case of a community thing, but we are in a fairly well-known case of an entity that has its own roadmap and the people who gather around it and that afterwards we will arrive at a system where we will try, we will talk about it later, to have a shared governance.
Bertille : yes, it was also to complete what Timothée’s remarks. In fact, there is also a desire through LaSuite.coop, it is in fact to approve all these players who are small to try to be a little bigger. But there is also this desire for the end customer or end user. is that there is only one way in. We explain it like that, and it’s the truth of what’s going on under the hood.
In fact, it is the aggregation of several collectives or companies or operatives. But the desire we have is that for end users and end customers, there is a one-stop shop through which they go to access the various services of the LaSuite.coop. And that it can provide an offer that is part of the entire digital food chain, in a way, digital office automation, collaboration, that is to say that we can first offer a service of evaluation of the scope of migration, the migration schedule, deployment, migration itself, then training, adoption.
And in fact it’s both to offer the tools themselves but also all the support that goes with them and that’s what we also want to build a strong territorial anchoring in contact with customers, that is to say to have a kind of spin-off of LaSuite.coop project where other people can take it up, other people can accompany, To train, to help with adoption.
Because what’s also important behind this project is the human aspect for us and that we don’t just become a platform where we click and button and then we get by with our tools. And to maintain a significant contact and a support service that allows interaction and promotes the sharing of knowledge and skills.
Why Free Software Didn’t Win
Walid : ok, I think the human side is something super important.
I say this because I was watching the conference you gave recently, Timothée, at the Free Software Days (JDLL) 2026.You said that in fact free software was good but it was basically a bit of a geek thing and it had failed because there was not, you will certainly talk about it better than me but I understood and it lacked this human side, It was still very technical, we didn’t have that, if I understood correctly.
Timothée : There are two aspects that I see in the failure of free software. Free software has won technically, I think we all agree with that. We have free software everywhere, the internet runs thanks to free software. American big tech companies use free software, contribute to free software too, even if they capture all the value anyway.
But technically we won and for me there are several failures, there is an economic failure.
We have not managed to put in place economic models that make the value really shared, the famous trickle-down. There’s this failure, and indeed, we, the librists, activists and what they do, we’re a bit in this world of techos between techs, guys, cis-genre, 30, 40, 50 years old. And we stay in our little world and our own little thing. And it doesn’t open up to a wider audience or other profiles of communicators, profiles with the most marketing. It’s a bad word, and an accompaniment.
I think that’s what Framasoft tried to do a lot with KITTENS, to push the KITTENS to this human side. I think we didn’t really succeed.
Walid : you can define the kittens for those of them who haven’t listened to the episodes with Framasoft on the twenty years of Framasoft please [see this part on the KITTENS].
Timothée : So the CHATON is the Collective of Autonomous, Transparent, Open, Neutral and Supportive Hosts. Basically, to make it quick, Framasoft is launching its de-googled internet campaign, which is a huge success. A lot of people are discovering that there are alternatives. But Framasoft does not want to become the new point of centralization of services.
Suddenly, they say to themselves, we’re going to develop a collective with lots of hosts, people who can host online services. is accessible to as many people as possible. There was this idea of being human: you can go for a coffee with your host. Today it’s been ten years, there are lots of kittens, it’s a great success in itself, but we’ve still been a bit of a tech project between tech.
I think that we are not very clear about people who are a little distant from these issues. Well that’s part of the reason why we wanted to launch LaSuite.coop also, I think, is that today it’s not readable all this mess of free software, you have a lot of different solutions, you have a lot of different ways to do it.
I think there’s a bit of a desire to have a strong brand, that people say okay, that’s it. While keeping this side, we don’t want to recentralize everyone, we don’t want to create a mega structure, we’re going to federate a lot of expert players in their field who operate the services behind them, but on the other hand for the person who uses the services, you have the brand, LaSuite.coop and you don’t ask yourself any questions, You know it’s going to be solid at the back.
Walid : Bertille, how long did it take from the moment you saw the developments of LaSuite? How much time and what type of discussion do you have with the other actors with whom you were already talking to in order to be able to make LaSuite.coop? What are the stages you go through?
Bertille : In fact, we have started to have the tools arrive in 2024, if I’m not mistaken. In fact, there are two slightly different paths, there is the Indie Hosters who have seen and contributed to the design of the tools, in particular the Visio and Docs tools, if that’s what Tim is, with DINUM?
Timothée : We discussed, we advised them, we gave them our feedback and I would have given them a few tips on bookstores in particular, but our contribution remains modest.
Bertille : And when I was still at Open Source Politics, in fact two and a half years ago, I was shown the existence of Grist, a software that has the crossroads of Excel and Airtable, which allows you to make small No-code and Low-code applications. We needed it in the context of citizen participation to facilitate the processing of data by public officials, especially within the scope of participatory democracy.
In fact, it took off well and we saw the relevance of this tool and how it could really simplify the life and a lot of time of public officials who were sometimes still on Excel files that were shared v1, v2, v15, final version 1, final version 2, 3.
So we understood the gap between sometimes collaboration practices that could exist in the private sector and there in the public sector, did we see the state of affairs? We thought that Grist was very good news and that in the end the other tools of the suite that were offered by the DINUM Suite were also quite interesting.
December 2024, it seems to me, we were at an event, again in Paris. And we said to ourselves, we can see the relevance of the tools, they are super nice, we have something to do, I think it was December 2024. I think it’s more on the Indie Hosters side that they started to activate the network they had, so in particular Yaal, so the cooperative of developers who are based in Bordeaux is Galae for the mail.
And in fact all we saw was a little bit in the way Tim was telling it just before, it was the fact… the CHATON project, for example, was a bit of tech between tech and that there was not necessarily a way to go beyond this audience. And with profiles like people from Open Source Politics, so like me, but there are also others, we used free software and we defended its use.
We put more emphasis on the practice and the support and advice that could be given to it. The profile was a little bit the complementarity that was necessary between ok we have all the companies and the technical skills, but how did we manage to also aggregate slightly less technical views to go beyond the tools of the suite just among ourselves, of the freelancers and the ecosystem which is very nice but which is not enough in fact to reach other strata of the population.
That was in December 2024, in March 2025 we are meeting in a Lyon countryside. I don’t remember where it was, but Tim it’s because it was near his home. And so, we’re having our first meeting, we’re going to tell you what we’re doing, what are we proposing? So, start and launch the brand, LaSuite.coop, where we defined a little bit what our service offer was, what our price was, how we were going to structure ourselves to be able to articulate a little bit all the companies that were going to offer the services behind our offer.
It started like that in March and then we did a lot of iterations anyway, that is to say that for a year we regularly reviewed our offer, our price offer mainly but also of products, that is to say that the DINUM continued to develop, strengthen and mature their product. At the beginning, we had put a lot of tools, so there were those of the DINUM, but we had also made many others available, then we backtracked, telling ourselves that our offer was not readable.
So it’s full of iterations for a year and now we can say that since the beginning of 2026 we have a stabilized offer both product and price. On the people who don’t take that too, it’s come a little bit, so I was talking to you a lot about Open Source Politics: Open Source Politics was bought by a company called Go Vocal and which bought only the perimeter of digital participatory democracy. So the people who were contributing to the panco-op suite through Open Source Politics could continue to do it but without going through Open Source Politics because that’s what this adventure ends on that side.
So we are gradually integrating the LaSuite.coop project in its own right. And now, we have just filed the statutes, in June. So it took us a year and a half, or even two years, to go through this whole process between the first meetings, to launch the brand, to launch the service offer, and to have the legal structure that could allow us to really launch the project and make it sustainable for the years to come.
Walid: Timothée, do you have anything to add?
Timothée: The brand, as Bertille said, has been launched for a while now, supported by Indie Hosters, the cooperative, the SCOP. But yes, it was full of iterations. Forming a collective takes time, we all know it: we go faster on our own, but we go further together, we know that whole phrase. The thing that I find interesting, which is notable in our communities, is… I don’t know, we have a bit of this thing of humility or fear, we want to do well. And we have this fear, you see, of being able to take your place again.
We have always tried to be cautious about mobilizing several people. Indie Hosters we didn’t want to take up too much space, because it’s a project we’ve had in mind for a long time but we want others to take it up. And as a result, you’re still browsing this thing. Everyone must really be able to have their place. You shouldn’t take the lead too much, etc.
And there you have it, all this dynamic of doing things collectively, it’s a huge job. We are supported for this kind of thing. Taking support in the collectives is something very important. There you go, we have navigated quite a bit between we start completely from a blank sheet, we start from the history of Indie Hosters, we iterate on it. At one point, there was talk of a ndie Hosters becoming the new cooperative. In the end, we created a new company and we still carry this fear of seeing you take up all the space, the space is huge, from there we take all the space, we have a long way.
The goal is to de-escalate everyone, at the same time not to centralize and to ensure that there are plenty of actors who can be paid for their work because that’s also the project we’re carrying, it’s that the people who work on it are paid with dignity, and that everyone can work on free software. But here’s the thing, that’s what is fascinating in our collectives, to navigate to do together and we are not start-ups, we don’t want to go fast and the goal is not to make a multi-billion dollar exit. So there you have it, we’re navigating in this balance of the commons, I want to say.
The choice to have made a SCIC
Walid: I have a lot of questions in everything you’ve said, so I’ll try to ask them as I go along. The first, perhaps Bertille, was the choice of the structure as a SCIC a choice that was discussed or was it obvious?
Bertille: So that, I suggest you redirect this question to Timothée.
Walid: ok, Timothée then?
Timothée: We asked that directly. In fact, we Indiostars have tested everything, that basically it’s a self-employed project. Pierre and I were self-employed, then we moved on to an employment activity cooperative [CAE]. I was at Oxalis, because we were starting to have responsibilities and everything and we had to secure our status a little, we went to CAE. It was around the time when we had won a big public contract, we had to secure ourselves.
Then, we became a commercial association subject to VAT. So we liked this model of the association which is ultra simple. You can do what you want in your statutes. And you see, you operate like a company and then we started to grow a little bit too so that’s more or less, it’s a little bit before Covid and…
And post-Covid the team is growing, we’re taking a step, let’s say it’s the V2 of Indie Hosters. That’s when we also review our offer, etc. But then, we’re an association, but not an employer, because we thought it’s the engineering of work, we’re going to put it in activity and employment cooperatives. We encouraged people to be part of that, except that it’s a bit complicated to make a double collective: you’re in the collective of your CAE and to them you’re in the collective of your association.
Then we said to ourselves, ‘ok, we’re going to become a cooperative, a SCOP’. Our project is for employees to own their work tools. We already worked like that in the association, ultra-horizontal, everyone had a chapter. We are also part of a network called LibreEntreprise, so we carry values such as the single salary for example.
Free enterprise, for your information, is companies that apply the values of free software to the company: the idea of horizontality, of power to the worker, the single salary, that kind of thing. A limited size also in companies, I think it was 30 employees or something like that. Above, you change the dynamics, I think too.
We started with a really technical project, with people having fun, in entrepreneurial mode. After that it gets a little more serious, it’s up to them. Ok, now there are more of us, we create an association, then we become a SCOP because it’s a worker’s project that owns their work tool. And we were missing this thing, “well now what do we do with our clients who we call contributors at Indie Hosters?”.
Well, if we want to bring them into this dynamic of we do common, contribute to this common, well in fact it has to be a SCIC, so that you can integrate all your stakeholders including the end users into your governance. And so it’s kind of the logical continuation of this whole process in our history. And here we really want to make a commons so we open up governance to all stakeholders. That’s the basic thing we put on the table: LaSuite.coop, it will be a SCIC and we did it together.
Walid: These aspects of SCIC that I refer you to episode 4 of season 1 with Florent Cayré from Commown, we talk about them a lot too.
Timothée: They are on the board of directors of LaSuite.coop, so we try to draw inspiration from those who have already done it.
Create a repeatable model
Walid: yes, hello to them. So, the second question of what I understand from the discussions and what I have been able to listen to before in other conferences, the idea is to try to ensure that the model that you are putting in place is reproducible if I have understood correctly. Bertille, do you want to say a few words about it? The goal is not to gain a lot of weight, the goal is rather to have a reproducible model a bit like the Kittens in the end.
Bertille: So the goal in the very short term is to grow a little bit in the sense of being able to hire a few people to be able to sustain the project and especially to carry out the developments that are necessary for progress in the market. On the other hand, we do not have this desire for over-growth. We want to be profitable but not necessarily to grow for growth’s sake.
And we are also asked a lot of the question of “but do you address other European countries, because it could make sense”?. And in fact, our answer for the moment is “no, but hey, if there are Luxembourgers or Belgians who need it during the week, we can do something”. But that the desire is above all to create a kind of double community.
In fact, it’s a kind of squared commons, both the commons that resides in the products, in the software, and therefore to try to build a community of contributors to the software to be able to sustain and stabilize them over time.
Animate a life also around its software there. And there is a second community in fact that can pre-exist, which is the municipality, well the commons which is the cooperative, and so that this model is not exclusively ours but that others can contribute to it both through a governance that is shared and democratic but also that can take hold of what we have tried to build in France, but not only in France… well in France in the sense that they can replicate it in other countries in Europe or elsewhere.
On French territory, we are not the only ones who can and want to deploy this suite and we are gladly open to doing so and allowing its replication in other French territories. For the moment we don’t cover everything, neither all audiences, nor all territories, so we are very open and even impatient to have other people who can join us and to whom we can make some recommendations of the small advances we have been able to have in recent months.
So these are going to be the next steps, not for now, but between now and 2027, it’s going to be how do we manage to open source, in fact, completely our cooperative model and the way we have built ourselves to also create a federation, a community that, if in Spain, if in Germany or if in Brittany, There are people who want to make these services, these tools available in the same way as we did, so that we can support them, the documentation is accessible.
Project support
Walid: I’m going back to something you said earlier, Timothée. I don’t know which of the two would like to answer, but you talked about accompaniment and you said that you are accompanied?
Timothée: yes
Walid: I’m interested, can someone say a few words about it?
Timothée: Indie Hosters, even when there were only four of us, we had people who were experts in collective intelligence or collectives that accompanied us. It was Cécile [Favé-Urbanet] in this case. We’re all in full remote, we don’t see each other often. We do two camps a year, we see each other for at least a week.
We rent a bed and breakfast and we live and work together. So during these times we were accompanied by someone which allowed us to learn a lot of techniques etc to be a team. And then, on LaSuite.coop, a part that we haven’t talked about, but we are doing a fundraising campaign, mobilization, in any case, the opening up of the membership.
Walid: We’ll come back to that later.
Timothée: In any case, on this part we also get support. There is also part of the support, which is to work together with all these companies that are learning to work together. I follow quite a bit what the University of We do, this kind of stuff and they have a lot of methods that we can apply and we asked for this kind of support. It’s important to be able to take a step back, when you’re in your head in the handlebars yourself, even if you’re a small collective for your group time, it’s better to have someone outside who helps you at the beginning and afterwards who gives you the right tools and methods.
Bertille: If I can add to that, it’s because we’re still at the beginning of structuring all these companies and all these new people who are actually working together. So Indie Hosters had already done this preliminary work. some people from Open Source Politics already knew a little bit about Indie Hosters, but it’s also a new way of working together.
There are also the ones we have been discovering for a year. So we still have a lot of things to learn and a lot of support to ask for, but also to people who listen to us and who have already experienced this kind of thing, from a federation of companies who must carry out a project together and co-construct it. We are interested in your feedback, so don’t hesitate to contact us.
Timothée: And maybe I’ll just come back to your question from before. It’s something that works a lot on me, this idea of how we can replicate our model. And as I said before, we’re going to be forever this tension between today, we need something that is really visible to the general public. Because between us, when we are aware of these issues, we will find solutions, etc. And we’re going to find the right service providers, we’re going to do it ourselves.
But we need something that, unfortunately, in a way, will take the spotlight. A more global movement and yes so how will we succeed afterwards in not continuing to centralize everything at home and succeed in decentralizing this thing, I am curious to see start to happen. I have a few ideas, it can be by territory, it can be by theme, it can be by technical question: storage experts, infrastructure experts, thing experts.
We make small groups like that, or by territory, or those who are in the health sector, those who are associations, or those who work with CAE cooperatives, third places… Finally, I think that there are quite a few ways in which we can think about this network and make a federation in a certain way. You find this balance between being as visible as possible and at the same time not falling into the trap of creating a new big thing, even if we’re so far from it anyway and the market is so huge.
Today, if we want to steal market share from Microsoft, finally, we have to manage to carry something together and we are far from that, there is a long way, but we are getting there little by little and there in any case the signals are ultra positive to move forward.
Walid: ok, I’m going to go back to the history of financing, but every time, I find it super funny because you only talk about Microsoft, I work in start-ups, Microsoft, it doesn’t exist, it’s Google. So it always makes me really funny to hear people talk about Microsoft, because in our daily lives, Microsoft, it’s not the problem, it’s Google, but hey, anyway.
Timothée: I think it was Bertille who sweated on me with her communities. In local authorities, Microsoft has a strong presence.
Walid: ha ha ha ha! yes, that’s clear!
Bertille: But in fact it’s quite interesting because Microsoft is never talked about, but a very, very large part of French communities are on Microsoft.
Walid: Well yes, it’s historic!
Bertille: So actually, well, that’s it. And when we go to national education, in higher education in fact, we are gangrenous by Microsoft. Indeed, in companies, it’s Google, but what’s also very interesting is, we were talking about it in a reflection for a campaign video, it’s: Microsoft in fact, they’re not called bad guys for the general public. We know that OpenAI is not good, that Google is not good, that Apple is not great. But Microsoft in fact, they are so discreet that we manage to forget about them as a problem that is as prevalent and as important as Google.
Walid: They have the experience. Compared to others, they’ve been through other things, trials, gadgets, they’ve learned what. I always come back to this but, well, me, my sports club that wants to do without Google at the moment, it’s really complicated. Frama’s tools don’t do it. When a hyper reduced budget, your offer is really limited.
Timothy: yes.
Walid: That’s what you are right now, it’s a real problem, I said to myself “ok, what am I doing?”. And in fact with a very very constrained budget, it’s not magic, you don’t have much to get out of Google, except Google.
Timothée: yes, it’s clear, they were very strong on that. Even if now, it has become paid, I think, for Google associations. But yes, everyone was watered in free mode. He makes money on the side with how they exploit data and all that.
So it’s very hard to propose something against that, knowing that we have real hits. The idea is that everyone is well paid, and that’s why we need to scale up too. If we don’t manage to get a certain volume, in fact we will necessarily have too much money to be able to offer more accessible prices to those who have less means. After all, Framasoft has been doing a great job for years.
We talk a lot with Frama, we don’t know each other for years. Close. They are thinking about offering LaSuite’s tools by the way. We also try to find a balance between what Framas can offer, what Lasuite.coop could offer and having a somewhat coherent offer between full free and but minimum service, LaSuite.coop is a “more professional” service when you are paid to solve your problems. We have working hours that are respected.
For me, it’s the pooling that will solve all this, the more we succeed in pooling our services, the more we will be able to lower costs and then we can make the services of actors who really don’t have the means more accessible and in any case it’s normal, the sports association is not going to put thousands of euros in… The tools depend on the associations, there are some who are ultra professional too. But yes, in any case, pooling is going to be the key to the thing and as long as we haven’t passed a certain mass, we won’t be able to.
The financing of LaSuite.coop
Walid: Ok, I’d like us to come back to what you’re building and especially how you’re going to finance all this. So there, you are building a SCIC. To whom and how you open up contributions from people other than those involved from the start. Bertille?
Bertille: a cooperative of collective interest allows us to have different colleges that make it up. So we have 5 different colleges that make up the SCIC, which are the employees, the service operators, so the companies that will provide a service in LaSuite.coop, the customers, the individual beneficiaries, the end customers.
We will also have another type of customer who are the collective beneficiaries, so it can be a community, it can be a company. Finally, we have a fifth college, which is that of the supporters who are not necessarily customers of the services that can be made available but who want to take part in the cooperative project and integrate governance and decision-making.
Each of its colleges assigned a weighting for the final vote, so a vote must be 100% and in fact each college was assigned a percentage share of the final decision-making process. So it seems to me that employees account for 30%, service operators account for 20%, customers, whether collective or unitary, also account for 20% and support who are not necessarily customers but who wish to take part in cooperative life represent 10%.
Knowing that they are colleagues but that within each of these colleges there may be legal entities or individuals who take part and each person, therefore each entity, equals one vote.
In fact, in a cooperative, in order to be able to enter it, you need to buy shares. So with us, a share is equal to 100 euros. So even if a person decides to buy several shares, he or she will only have one voting right, in the sense that one person equals one vote, regardless of the number of shares you hold.
So, as we said before, we filed our statutes last week, so in June, and we will open our membership at the beginning of July, normally. So, what does that mean? This means that we will offer individuals, companies, communities, any legal or individual entity that wishes to do so the opportunity to take part in the cooperative by buying shares.
We made this decision eight months ago now, I think it was the end of 2025 or in fact we said to ourselves that we were going to have a desire to cooperate together, so really to have a base of people who take part, who are consistent enough to go beyond the self-isolation that we already knew, and therefore really build a roadmap with the different stakeholders who will be the users and also want to contribute to this type of project.
So for that, we are also accompanied in this whole campaign, because to solicit new people, to go beyond our circles that we already know, we have to mobilize, in fact, address different speeches according to the typology of the circles that we want to solicit and mobilize, simplify and popularize our discourse a little bit, Because we also talk in general once again one among ourselves.
So how do we go beyond the knowledge and awareness we have on these issues, beyond the circles that revolve around digital technology and especially free software or cooperatives to address less informed audiences but who nevertheless have a legitimacy and also an interest in taking part in this type of initiative.
So since January we have been accompanied by Clément Perrault who has a long experience in citizen mobilization and also in fundraising for cooperatives, so he accompanied two or three cooperatives in their fundraising.
When we talk about fundraising, it’s really about mobilizing to find new people in the membership. So it was several steps, first of all it is to define what our different levels are, so what is our financial objective for the first mobilization campaign, knowing that the Membership will remain open forever, it is just that there are more or less active phases where we are doing in terms of communication in fact the opening of our Membership.
So we have a goal of around 500,000 euros, or even 1 million euros for this first campaign. We also had to define all the levels that would allow us to achieve this objective and what they included, that is to say that from 250,000 euros, what are we going to do from 500,000 euros, what are we going to do from 750,000 euros?
We can come back to it in detail right after we defined these levels and we also tried to define a strategy that was a little more global in fact than just office automation because in fact Clément who accompanied us said “well it’s super interesting what you do with office automation but I don’t understand why you don’t also do social networks, And why don’t you also use the means of payment?”
We told him “well because we don’t know how to do it. What we know how to do is that, it’s office automation, with software suites for collaboration, and above all that there are other people and other players who are already working on these issues.” But it still made us think a little bit and mature about what we want to wear with the LaSuite.coop.
Where we are at the moment is the fact that LaSuite.coop is a vector that will allow us to initiate a broader mobilization movement to decarbonize our digital technology. We know how to make the first brick of a collaborative suite, office automation: we are ready, the products are mature on the other hand with pleasure and with a great desire also to try to go beyond office automation to go beyond just this product, in the sense that we want to make different types of people and different actors and companies dialogue. who are thinking about these issues and organizing together to define a strategy that will allow us to get out of the GAFAM at different scales.
So, we organized a first workshop in February and March, which brought together various players in free software, but also researchers who have been carrying out these reflections for several years. There was David Chavalarias who had led HelloQuitteX, to share with them our idea and our desire to do something together, to open up our membership, but also to carry and initiate a broader movement.
What came to the conclusion was the fact that we weren’t going to reinvent the wheel, that there were a lot of things that existed beforehand and that it was above all the fact of pooling and federating the different players to have a common roadmap that was going to be necessary in the coming months to be able to take action.
There is a second step that we have also taken as part of this mobilization, which is also to ask ourselves the question of how we have reached a wider audience? So there, we were also accompanied by another person called Léa Garson, who has accompanied other cooperatives such as Coop-medias, and who is currently working, for example, with the Licoornes and who is committed to other economic models for a more interesting and less growth-oriented economy. And on the other hand, it has a whole network and a network of committed influencers.
And so in fact, we organized a second time of exchange this time. by crossing paths with people from the LaSuite.coop. researchers but also influencers. We organized a round table and we also did a workshop, an afternoon workshop, on are you already aware of this subject? What is your level of knowledge? Do you think this is a topic that could interest you, your communities? And above all, how would we manage to get a really larger part of civil society in motion to be alert on these subjects and above all to participate in this movement of transition of our daily digital technology?
It was quite interesting because in the end they had a lot of ideas, they were alert on these subjects but were not necessarily aware of all the implications and implications that it required.
And they came up with a lot of leads and ideas on how we were going to be able to solicit them and transform this dynamic of engagement that we know on social networks, such as Instagram, but precisely to get out of these social networks. It was pretty neat. So suddenly, it nourished us a lot and it also echoed a lot of thinking that we had, but that we weren’t necessarily able to activate.
And to come back to the society campaign itself, we are currently in the early stages of really opening up to the general public. We activated our first circles, we activated pre-registrations for members as well. We are at more than 850 people who have pre-registered. So we’re very happy and very happy, we’d like to have more.
So that’s also what we’re preparing in the broader campaign where we’re going to have press releases to share information with the various journalists and media but also to reach the general public both because we want them to take part in our cooperative life but also to raise their awareness, to show them that alternatives exist.
And so there for that we have a campaign video that is in the stockings. was shot a few days ago and will be released in a few days we hope. And for the temporality, we’re going to launch in July, or at the very beginning of July. We haven’t decided yet how long the active communication phase will last, but as I said before, the membership is still open, so even if you listen to us in 2027, there is no active campaign, you can join the membership and take shares to take part in the cooperative life.
Walid: It’s really interesting this aspect of how we get out of our circle and who we’re going to be accompanied with for that.
Bertille: Yes.
Walid: How do you build an imaginary, a positive narrative around all this too? I was thinking of the people at Framasoft who were talking about it to say that we have to build something positive that makes people want to do it, and not just tell them where the GAFAM is bad and all. There are things to do. So typically, these influencers, what is their field for example, if you have a few examples, just that I imagine a little, not necessarily the names, but rather what they usually talk about.
Bertille: There are accounts that denounce the types of fraudulent influences or that dropship and others, so behaviors that are not acceptable for the moment. Most of it is for the climate, so for alternatives both in terms of consumption but also there are some who specialize in agriculture, there are two women farmers we met. There are also comedians who comment and react to current events in an earlier alternative current of left.
In fact, they all know each other, not really all, but they are all a little bit part of those influencers who offer a different consumption of social networks and who want to highlight alternatives that exist and take advantage of their notoriety to advance causes and projects.
Walid: Tomothée, do you have anything to add or are we skipping the last part?
Timothée: Our challenge is to accelerate, we’ve already been doing this for a long time, in a very, very, very organic way. It’s cool too, but really if we want to take this step, we have to be more numerous, more numerous, we have more means to reach a wider audience, in fact that’s really the whole challenge, what it is to get out of our silos.
And that’s why the more members we have, the more people in the societyrias, the more credible we will be too, and one of the issues that we haven’t talked about too much in this part is that we have to reach a fairly high level, but there is a whole issue of advocacy as well. So that we manage to raise awareness among politicians, to raise awareness among as many people as possible to advance this idea of making commons.
We need politicians and the public for that. actions that are done, and that we can counter the whole side, the more lobbying part let’s say, which is not ultra aggressive. They don’t want us well, so not all of them, I don’t put everyone in the same boat, but the liberal capitalists are in place too, the capitalists in the owner. They’re not going to let all this happen, so we have to be one and that’s what we want to offer too. With LaSuite.coop, it’s to be attentive to all this. The higher we go together, the stronger we can be.
Perhaps an element because it should be noted in our model that we have chosen not to remunerate the shares because we are in a bit of a dynamic of non-profit-making. We are commercial, the goal is to be profitable of course, but we don’t reduce the shares. We contribute to this commonality. There are tax advantages that are interesting, it can be more interesting than letting your money sit in the bank in fact, especially since there is a good chance that you will be recognized as an ESUS, so a solidarity company of social utility. That’s why you can have 25% exemptions on your taxes, but that’s the details.
It’s still a small tax advantage rather than letting your money sit on a tenant, well it’s better to put it in cooperatives, of which LaSuite.coop is a part, but there are many others, we mentioned the Licoornes, which is a network of cooperative societies of collective interest in many areas of society, Energy, the media, there are many different areas, to show that there is another model than capitalism that is possible. All these issues are found in the model we want to support.
Reflections for the future / we live in great times
Walid: You just talked about it but I have the last big part and I had called it to your thoughts for the future. I would like to go back for a second to what was said at the beginning because it seems to me… Well, this effervescence and everything, it’s still a pretty great moment, I’m quite happy that we’re living it a little bit in our lifetime, you know.
This kind of paradigm shift of the state that starts to develop software, 100% free and that will make it possible, potentially, as you do, but as others will do, to create an ecosystem around it. You can say what you want, but you can see that even abroad there are a lot of people watching, it’s like a quite different and quite innovative model. How did you feel about that?
At first I was quite skeptical. Because I said to myself, well, the state still needs to have the means to do this for a long time. And so, it poses governance problems, since tomorrow you can have another political alternation that comes along and says, your thing is over. Hence we come back to what we were talking about on Decidim where they finely took the governance out of the Barcelona City Hall. How do you see things for the future? Bertille, do you want to start?
Bertille: Actually, the subject and your remarks are still relevant. We don’t know yet, we don’t know what the DINUM will come in 2027. There are always these governance issues. Indeed, there are various European players who are interested in the tools of the suite. But how do we co-construct them together and sustain them together?
First of all, to answer the first question, it’s quite exciting. That is to say, we are still living in a moment where, because of the geopolitical tribulations and especially the American influences, we tell ourselves that this is the time in fact and that we will be able to do it and that there is a whole space that gives us hope in fact in a way and that makes our action possible.
After that, it’s good that we’re doing it, it’s good that we can seize the moment, but that’s how do we build the future? And how do we manage to sustain both the cooperative and the various software? And how do we manage to federate the different players who for the moment are not very numerous but we have no doubt about it will tend to grow both on French and European territory, who will seize its challenges and potentially these tools that have been developed by the DINUM.
We have different avenues, already for the software, it’s that we are working, we are already in contact with Mosacloud, the company that is based in the Netherlands, which integrates all the tools developed by the DINUM, so we are in fairly regular contact with them.
With the DINUM we also have some exchanges on their roadmaps, we are more or less aware of where they are going, but also we are thinking about how we do it, we manage more or less to replicate the Decidim model so to get it out of a single dependence of the public service, to get it out and allow it to be a third party that will tend to protect what has been built.
We are thinking about it in the sense that we have ideas of association with other players who integrate this software. We also potentially have an idea of in the SCIC. Why not institutions or communities really take part in the cooperative and therefore both sustainable in the cooperative and therefore the common. It’s something that’s open too.
We want to get out of dependence on public services, but we don’t want to build dependence via an economic model that would be ours, via a company. So we don’t just want us to own the software code for the suite. So we would like to find an alternation that would allow all these actors to be intertwined with a governance that is open, a roadmap that is shared and a community that is really active and that is not concentrated on one, two or three actors.
We also want to contribute both through developments and financially to this software. We have an objective to contribute via our turnover, to donate part of our turnover that is generated by the free software that we deploy and that we make available directly to the common. We are also thinking about how to do it, how to make this financial sub-arrangement in order to be able to pay directly.
And how do we make the decision of “oh well, we’re going to this how”, well, is it towards Element. Is it towards Grist? Is it to Docs? Is it to Visio? So I don’t think it’s up to us to make the decision in silos, but more so if there is an association, that we make the decision perhaps within the association, if not also with the members within the cooperative. but maybe with other actors if tomorrow he comes up and we move a little more forward on our reflections, but maybe you Tim want to complete.
Timothée: already yes I press on the thing it’s not fascinating enough there what is happening I am amazed that it is happening in this government moreover It’s really, as I said, a major paradigm shift and as you said again it redraws the landscape we know of free software or either you have a 100% community thing with 2-3 volunteer pelos who manage the thing and it’s fragile, Either you have a company that drives the project, you have a good goto market but you still depend on this company.
And then you have something that changes the whole landscape, you can really make a common. I’ve been in this commoner environment for a few years and we’re talking about this public-private partnership. And now I feel like I’m touching it so I’m excited, I want to go all out. Personally, I live there, what we are doing, I have been saying it since we started talking about LaSuite.coop. I’m playing my last card.
Now, it’s been 10 years, now, everything is green. Let’s go, let’s go all out. I’m burning myself out a bit, but I’m learning to take a little break anyway because it’s all tiring. You have to go, now you have more choice, you really have to go and it’s not even that you have any choice, it’s that everything is good to go.
It’s super exciting, there are still a lot of red flags, there are still a lot of dangers on the way but I think there are enough of us who see the experience and are already connected to each other in the networks to do it intelligently.
In the DINUM, there are people who are great and in any case, in the public service, there are always agents who really rely on the embodied public service. Real free software players, real commoners, and I think they’re really going to do everything they can to make it work and succeed in convincing the politicians up there and show that it works and that it’s possible, and that we can show that everyone can be part of it.
It’s a real economic issue where everyone will be able to find their way around, even those who are not sensitive to it and who are more in the classic dynamic, who will still be able to rely on these tools and so that’s where the Bertille association can come into play and put everyone around the table.
In short, I’m fascinated and we have to go. I don’t want to say it’s too late, we’re finally past the tipping point, but it’s not too late and we have to go all out because they’re going all out, so let’s go for it.
Europe is getting into it, I hope that France with its model will be a bit of a standard-bearer for what we can do, what there are also other models that are happening in Europe, especially in Germany with openDesk, a slightly more classic model I want to say, which is also valid, but there can be collaborations between the two models. Let’s go, Europe is waking up, France is launching something great. It is only you, the listeners, who have joined the movement.
Walid: What I think is great about not watching the French news a lot and watching other news elsewhere is to see that others elsewhere are watching it or even to interview people who are in other countries and who say like… What do we see about you? I already knew for a long time that making open source in France with free software is still not bad compared to some other countries.
This is something else. To see the coverage abroad of what’s going on here, the people talking about it, etc. We still tell ourselves that something is happening. And I too, through the podcast I try to do, is also interviewing people who make commons. We’ve already done several recently, we’ve done Open Terms Archive [episode here], we’ve done other things. We’re going to continue, it’s also to show all that. And try to make them known.
Well, we’re living in great times, that’s kind of the conclusion, I’ll leave a last word to each of you before we leave. We’ve already talked a lot about Bertille, do you have a final word to pass on to the listeners of the podcast Projets Libres.
Bertille: Thank you, if you stayed, until then. Thank you for your patience. We really want to be one together, so don’t hesitate to contact us, to join us. If you have ideas for contribution, improvement, evolution, anything, contact us, join us, become a member. If you don’t have the means, contact us at short and we will find a way to do it together.
So really, don’t hesitate, it’s open to everyone. And really to everyone, really all, I emphasize, don’t restrain yourself, even if you’re not developers or you don’t work in the product, I’m not tech again. There are other ways to contribute, we are fond of being current.
Timothée: I’m going to put my little triptych that I like to present, we haven’t talked about it but today we hear a lot about sovereignty, autonomy, independence, strategy. There is a lot of sovereignty-washing, I think.
Ask yourself the questions of is the project really open? Is it true open source? Is there really a shared governance? You have seen chapters. And what is the economic model? Who owns the company? Is it for shareholders? Is it for the project itself?
If you put all the boxes down, I think we can go for it. or at least we are trying to promote this idea. And as Bertille said, for me LaSuite.coop, it’s a vehicle, it’s a kind of sandbox, a sandbox, that everyone can seize. So come on, it’s your project as it’s ours and we really want to co-build it together. And the more we are in blue, the more we will have different profiles, we insist on this, the richer it will be in fact. And there you have it, the signals are green, let’s go, let’s stop resigning ourselves, let’s go.
Walid: That’s a very nice conclusion. I think that when the time comes, we will have the people from the DINUM to come and give their points of view on this as well. I’ll stop, I’ll make my conclusion, it’s that we’re living in great times, I won’t say more. I encourage everyone to go and follow what you are doing, you are interested in the subject if you are not already doing so. Well listen, thank you very much Bertille and Timothée for taking the time to come and explain what you do. I think we’ll talk a little later to see you with great pleasure.
Timothée: With pleasure, thank you
Timothée: And it’s great to have the time to be able to discuss. Thank you for this nice project of Free Projects.
Bertille: With great pleasure. Thank you, Walid.
Walid: See you soon!
Episode production
- Remote recording on June 22, 2026
- Basis: Walid Nouh
- Editing: Walid Nouh
This interview has been automatically translated from the original language into English.
Use of AI
You can consult our AI charter.
Production:
- Noise reduction in Audacity via OpenVino and the DeepNetFilter2 model
- Transcription: whisper-medium via mufidiwiwhi locally
- Transcription Improvement: Kimi K3
Publication:
- English translation of social media posts: locally with Jan and Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct
License
This podcast is released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license or later