How ONLYOFFICE helps Projet Internet et Citoyenneté to put the Internet at the service of citizens

The Projet Internet et Citoyenneté team aims to make the Internet useful for democracy and society outside the set of commercial platforms. They use ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud in their daily work and propose to their members to use them. Read this blog to learn the team’s story and how ONLYOFFICE editors make their work routine easier.

About Projet Internet et Citoyenneté

The PIC (Internet and Citizenship Project) is an association created at the end of the 20th century. As part of its mission, it contributes to the Internet being a tool for the service of citizens and democracy outside commercial platforms. It was already a sensitive moment at the time. The PIC, therefore, proposed a place where associative activists could share their means (professional quality servers shared by more than 100 associations today), but also their knowledge and know-how (technical workshops).

Some years ago, the association joined the collective of the CHATONS, which gathers alternative hosting providers concerned about the commercial exploitation of their users’ data and which exclusively uses and promotes free software.

The PIC provides its member associations with digital resources, hosting for their websites, hosting for their management software, and a “cloud” space. The PIC believes that associations are a privileged means of expression for citizens and a place for collective action. In addition, they organize technical workshops to share skills.

Over the last ten years, the number of member associations has increased fivefold. These are as many citizens who have their data protected from prying eyes. Without the PIC’s inexpensive proposal, these small associations would not have had a window on the Internet.

Why ONLYOFFICE

The PIC association advises its members to use the CMS of their choice if they care about supporting it, and if it is open-source software. In their work, they use servers that they administer themselves, all under GNU/Linux. To enable collaborative online document editing, the PIC uses and makes available ONLYOFFICE within Nextcloud, protected from the prying eyes of GAFAM.

The choice of these solutions was not accidental. They knew Nextcloud and had a lot of confidence in its quality. They learned about ONLYOFFICE through word of mouth and through the use of ONLYOFFICE on other cloud services provided by the CHATONS collective. Moreover, the team appreciated its excellent integration with Nextcloud, its similarity to the office suites everyone is used to, and yet a (relatively) lightweight server.

What the result is

The combination of ONLYOFFICE-Nextcloud has made office collaboration accessible to as many people as possible (thanks to a rich and familiar environment) without the need to deploy large infrastructure. The team adapted its document-sharing system based on Nextcloud access rights, and ONLYOFFICE is appreciated for fitting it perfectly.

In particular, the use of ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud has reduced the endless exchanges of emails with attached office files numbered v1, v2, v2.1, etc.

The most popular features that the team uses in ONLYOFFICE are:

• Note-taking;
• Reporting of association meetings;
• Online creation of presentations;
• Technical data analysis.

Even the writing of this blog, which was done with the help of the CIP Board of Directors at a distance from each other, was made using Nextcloud and ONLYOFFICE.