Continuing our monthly interview series "Building a Free Internet of the Future", we are now in conversation with Chrystalleni Loizidou, an NGI0 regional representative in Cyprus.
She makes observations on art, technology and politics, the urgent need to protect the commons, and software freedom.
As an NGI0 representative, she facilitates dialogue between local and regional projects and the NGI0 consortium; she helps to better understand and respond to the needs of the local community and to involve it in the process.
"Building a Free Internet of the Future" is published by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), highlighting the experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities supported by the NGI Zero (NGI0) grants. Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports free software, open data, open hardware and open standards projects. It provides financial and practical support in a myriad of forms, including mentoring, testing, security testing, accessibility, dissemination and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You are a digital humanities educator and strategist. And you have chosen to join the NGI Zero consortium. Why did you do this?
What a question :) My background is in art and politics, so I pay attention to how our media shape our realities and our communities. And both my education and my political impulse point to the same thing: the urgent need to protect the commons. To defend our communities from systems of extraction and exploitation. The free/libre open source (FLOSS) movement more generally, and the NGI initiative in particular, go straight to the heart of this issue. They work on a foundational level in order to heal the core principles of our digital infrastructure.
I love that you say that I "chose" this! For me, it feels more like a calling, or a rare and meaningful invitation. It's a privilege to be in a position to contribute to and learn from such a momentous effort: to bring European digital infrastructure into alignment with values of freedom, care and the public good. To help free it from the deep structural dangers we’ve inherited.
NGI0 receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. And The Horizon Europe regulation includes the concept of "widening" countries member states, including Cyprus. What does this mean?
"Widening countries" is the EU’s term for member states that joined during the major enlargement waves of the 2000s and early 2010s, and more broadly for regions historically underrepresented in EU research and innovation programmes. Horizon Europe introduced the "Widening Participation and Spreading Excellence" pillar to address disparities in participation, offering targeted funding to strengthen national research systems and improve integration into EU-level projects. On a broader level, we have to ask: can the "widening" framework truly enable meaningful participation, or does it merely manage asymmetry within a centralised research and innovation agenda?
I don't have the answer to that in general, but in the case of NGI0, I believe it absolutely does create meaningful openings. For countries like Cyprus, it offers concrete opportunities to access funding, to contribute to, and even lead, open source initiatives. And it’s a real pleasure for me to help facilitate this.
It means working towards strengthening Cyprus' role in the tech sovereignty movement, advancing the right to repair (which means so much for the sustainability of our communities, and our ecology locally), demanding accountability through public money-public code, and supporting the Cyprus-based FLOSS communities and ideologues already working toward these goals. So the real question is no longer whether Cyprus can join in, but whether and how it can help shape a digital agenda that reflects local priorities and community needs, while contributing to broader international transformations.
"Tech sovereignty" is on everyone's lips in the EU − Google, Microsoft, organisations promoting free/libre software, the EU Commission, the media, all groups across the political spectrum. Does “tech sovereignty” mean different things to different people depending on who uses it?
Yes! Tech or digital sovereignty certainly means different things to different people. At its broadest, it is about the nation-state's need to redefine its autonomy and power in the digital era, in response to its erosion by transnational corporations and global infrastructures. Now the way this need is interpreted varies widely. Unfortunately, for some it has come to mean expanded surveillance and militarisation of digital infrastructure. Big Tech also misuses the term: when Google or Microsoft speak of "sovereign clouds" they mean that European data can be hosted locally, while still being locked into their proprietary systems. For parts of the European Parliament and Commission, the term often denotes geopolitical autonomy: the EU’s capacity to resist US or Chinese dominance, rather than meaningful empowerment of citizens and communities. It's a term that travels across a spectrum from industrial strategy and geopolitics, to corporate marketing slogans, to community visions of democratic control. So while we ask "who" is invoking tech sovereignty, it's also important to ask what practices and power relations they are actually defending.
To me, digital sovereignty means that an entity (a person, a community or a country) fundamentally maintains freedom and control over the digital infrastructures it relies on. This is an inalienable right, but it's not where we are at the moment. Policy makers need to take care not to make decisions that compound oppression instead of safeguarding freedom. What we need is a freedom-respecting, commons-oriented foundation, rather than extractive or dependency-creating infrastructures. At the level of code, that means ensuring people, communities and governments can inspect, modify and control the tools they rely on. It means figuring out and normalising development and sustainability models for tech that has no profit-making or other agenda other than the common good. That is upholding democracy and human rights, protecting privacy, self-determination, freedom of expression and free will. The great difficulty is that this implies a redistribution of power from the hands of the few, from Big Tech and political hierarchies, into the hands of people, communities, and updated democratic processes. It requires technical capacity as well as democratic oversight and collective decision making. From this perspective, tech sovereignty is not just a safeguard. It's a truly wonderful endeavour. There is nothing more interesting or more beautiful than trying to figure out how humanity might tackle this new stage in its evolution.
What is your role in NGI0? And what does your work entail on a practical level?
I’m part of a growing team of regional representatives for NGI0, that connects the programme with local FLOSS communities and brings their perspectives into the European debate. My base is Cyprus, a small country but also a complex cultural and geopolitical hub under real pressures. Here, tech policy discourse is almost absent from the public sphere and the future risks being shaped by profit-driven, short-term, techno-solutionist and extractive logics that erode social and ecological coherence. So I see a big part of my role as problem solving and empowering those who want to build in a different direction. In practice, that means raising awareness about NGI0, but also matching the vast resources of this coalition (funding, technical expertise in development, security, licensing, accessibility, interoperability, peer networks and collaboration, not to mention openness in principle and digital rights across the board, along with policy linkages at the European level) with the concrete needs of people here. I also work to strengthen the FLOSS community itself: creating spaces for networking and inspiration, and showing that freedom-respecting, commons-oriented technologies are not just ideals, but real and powerful solutions. I’ve been part of this community for over a decade and I feel deeply connected to its sense of purpose, the ups and downs of its morale, and its potential.
Day to day, my work can be as concrete as researching and writing reports and articles, organising events and workshops, running info sessions, or having conversations with applicants and policy makers. But the deeper aim is to ensure that local inspiration and values find their place in Europe’s digital future, and to empower FLOSS to deliver answers to the challenges we face in governance and society.
Can you explain the local and/or regional pressures around Cyprus?
Cyprus is a small EU member state and a divided country, which – on the level of tech policy – has so far entailed a kind of risk-aversion regarding potential challenges to vested interests. This translates into a limited capacity for independent tech policy and a vulnerability to powerful lobbies which push for "safe" partnerships with large vendors. Needless to say, the latter hardly ever arrive with agendas that are respectful to democracy, ecology or society. This, along with the dominance of flashy innovation and growth discourse, and a lack of public discourse on tech and the common good, has up to now resulted in severe dependencies on proprietary technologies from non-EU providers. Pulling together and advocating for open and democratic alternatives in the face of these pressures is not easy. But we're doing it!
What are the profiles of the NGI0 candidates you encounter most often?
We have a small but strong FLOSS community in Cyprus, not least due to the hackerspace movement, which flourished on the island in the 2010s, and the Cyprus FLOSS Association (ELLAK.org.cy), which has been holding us together. NGI0 applicants tend to be strong developers, already committed to FLOSS. They may be part of an international team already working on something that matches NGI0 priorities or they may be lone wolves in flexible employment, who wish to dedicate their valuable time working on something they really care about.
Last but not least, the floor is yours. Would you like to pass on a message to our readers?
The world appears to be changing with increasing speed, but what is timeless about this discussion is that it's motivated by an ethos that goes beyond software: the work here is about fundamentally re-learning how to collaborate, shifting the norm of exploitation and extraction that has been tearing apart our communities, our mind or attention, and our environment. It's about taking responsibility for what we build, and about keeping technology aligned with life itself.
Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).