The departure of Benedict XVI? Not on this computer, sorry
In the modern world, more and more documents and services are made available in digital format. Even if it can be a source of huge progress for all humankind, this phenomenon often happens through technologies which become obsolete in a few years, are incompatible with each other or cannot be afforded by everybody. This fact creates serious obstacles to a really free communication among people, to the preservation of the cultural and spiritual heritage of humankind and to the diffusion of the Word of God.
The paragraph above is the introduction of the Eleutheros Manifesto that I and other Catholics wrote almost seven years ago. Today, February 28th, 2013, Pope Benedict’s last meeting in Vatican provides a perfect example of those obstacles we were, and remain, worried about. Because not everybody can follow it online, not from its source at least.
Vatican Player is “a multi-functional, multimedia tool which [among other things] allows you to watch live footage of all Papal celebrations."
News.Va, instead, is the online News Portal of the Vatican.
Neither of those two websites allows universal vision of today’s and other Catholic events, because they adopt a technology that only works on certain browsers and software platforms. By doing so, they exclude, without any real need, all people, Catholic or not, who for any reason cannot afford those specific systems, or may have plenty of other valid reasons to not use them.
This is exactly the reason why the Eleutheros Manifesto suggests, among other things, that:
Regardless of which software is adopted, only Open Formats and Protocols are used, by all Catholic Organizations to store or manage any kind of digital data, like for example text, images or music. Only this can guarantee that all digital documents are completely accessible to everybody, including those who cannot afford state of the art computers or the purchase of proprietary software, and above all that such documents remain available forever.
I hope this day will also be, for all Catholics, an opportunity for reflection on that and other suggestions in the Manifesto.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
The more direct support I get, the more I can continue to inform for free parents, teachers, decision makers, and everybody else who should know more stuff like this. You can support me with paid subscriptions to my newsletter, donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.THANKS for your support!