It's Alive...

It has only been a few weeks since a random interaction on Mastodon sparked the creation of this website and a group interested in digital sovereignty. Zeb King (@ZebKing) had asked a simple question regarding what was holding politicians back from embracing Mastodon. A discussion with opinions and suggestions ensued and Zeb pulled a few interested individuals into a Signal chat. Our initiative - Elbows Up for Digital Sovereignty - sparked to life. In that short time we have developed some strategies and have a few humble accomplishments.

Through Zeb's efforts we have put together a small steering committee that has been brainstorming ideas on what this project should look like and what direction it should take. We are a mixture of political, technical and corporate backgrounds that recognized early on we need the Mastodon Canada community to make a difference.

On January 27th we have a scheduled web meeting with a few dozen Canadian instance admins where we'll present some of our plans at a high level. More importantly we hope to collect their ideas and their input on fine tuning strategies, messaging and action plans. We believe that this meeting will be a major triggering event that will advance our planning.

Other minor achievements include establishing our Mastodon account (@ElbowsUpforDigitalSovereignty) and developing this website that will support our initiative, both inside and outside the Fediverse. We have also established the #MastoCanadaGOV hashtag to be used in our communications so our followers can stay updated.

We know the challenge ahead of us is significant but, like eating the proverbial elephant, we'll take one bite at a time.