Everyone is welcome at digirights.info, a free and open resource on digital rights, and specifically, our first course, on data protection.

We have come a long way from the beginning of last year, when we were given funding for the project from Internet Society’s Beyond the Net Funding Programme, and Eurooppatiedotus, which a sub-organisation of the Finnish Foreign Ministry, 21 000€ and 15 000€, respectively.

It took us several months to agree on what is essential to know about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and how would we present it to the general public. It was also challenging to get all the content done without actually paying everyone for all their hard work. Both of our funders had a strict limit on how much money can be spent on salaries (15% and 30%). On the other hand, they both allowed paying companies and outsourcing work to people outside the organisation, which made the progress unnecessarily tricky, but at least possible.

Here’s what we’ve done:

1. Seven workshops on creating content, including a larger workshop day after the GDPR day on the 25th of May, with 23 people making data requests to different organisations.
2. So far, two training workshops, of which one was for students in Tampere, and another for pensioners’ IT-trainers in Helsinki. In the latter, they even wrote a blog about the session.
   We’re still trying to confirm the date for having a third training session for boyscouts in February, and hopefully will be able to set the date for it next week.
3. We’ve received a decent amount of coverage in the media:
   Helsingin Sanomat (biggest newspaper in Finland, 28.8.2018)
   MTV (24.5.2018)
   GDPR Today (28.1.2019)We’re also waiting on another Finnish reporter to go through our course material and write a story about his experience – hopefully it’ll happen soon!
4. Had the launch event on the 15th of January in Eurooppasali.
5. We’ve had 2/4 of the introductory/feedback webinars, which take place on Tuesdays, at 16 UTC.
6. I applied for a session to present our project at RightsCon 2019 and hopefully we’ll get accepted!

I also want people to be aware, that the license for the whole project is Creative Commons 4.0, which essentially means, that we want people to do anything they want with the material, without asking for a separate permission to do so, even for commercial purposes. Most of all, we want as many people as possible to know their rights and how to exercise them. That is really for all of our benefit.

Raoul Plommer
Project Manager of digirights.info