Gandi Social Club, an event that does good!

Supporting alternative projects has always been at the heart of what we do at Gandi, both in backing open source projects, citizen initiatives, humanitarian causes, and local organizations. Today we back more than 300 projects, organizations, or events. And from this closeness with the non-profit milieu, we have been able to glimpse the amazing talent and passion with which those in this space do their work, though unfortunately, we’ve never had the chance to meet many of those we’ve been supporting all these years face to face.

Careful to act only as catalyzer and simply facilitate some synergy among all the projects we support, we have launched the Gandi Social Club, a series of events made for our supported projects.

And so this past Tuesday, thanks to special support from PIR (the .org registry), who helped us along the way, we organized the very first edition of Gandi Social Club, in the form of a “Pitch Party,” a format that helped facilitate conversation around problems faced by each speaker respectively.

Nine passionate pitchers came to present their projects, explain some of the difficulties they face, and offer their help over the course of the night:

• Aymeric Barantal spoke to us about Caliopen and explained the importance of raising as much awareness as possible of the need for secure online communications.
• Jean-Baptiste Kempf told us about the creation of Videolan and the choice of the famous graphic that became the symbol of VLC, the famous free, opensource media player.
• François Pumir outlined the pedagogical methods of the Hetic school which educates future digital experts, and offered the assistance of his students to the projects present.
• Cyril Marion from FIDH (Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme or International Federation for Human Rights) made us aware of the vital need for secure communications in the context of defending human rights, and put out the call for conference line system experts
• Alex Hoyau then came to introduce us to Silex Labs, its community, and the workshops it organizes to help demystify computer science careers and open up access to them.
• Kiti Mignotte and Gabrielle Garnier spoke to us about Mana, a project that gathers, analyzes, and synthesizes data related to environmental threats linked to business activities.
• We also learned about the project Reconnect “Cloud solidaire”, presented by Pierre Le Dauphin. This simple, secure storage solution facilitates communication between social service providers and people in need.
• Eric Lalitte offered the help of students of the school In’Tech, a human-scale school that has chosen to involve its students in longterm projects that allow students and businesses to efficiently forge durable relationships.
• Finally, Christophe and Pierre spoke to us passionately about their contributions to Mozilla and the need for more contributors to continue to improve, translate, and continue to advance the famous browser and its associated services.

At the end of these presentations, all involved were given a chance to mingle over a beer and we know many great ties were forged that will lead us to a better world.

We hope that out of this event, and those that follow in this vein, that important collaborations can come about as well as whole new initiatives. Of course we won’t forget to continue to update you about future editions of the Gandi Social Club, which we may open in a limited capacity to the public.

Stay tuned!