Estimated reading and watching time: combined twenty five minutes.
Quick summary: the human factor sits at the center of one health, and it is failing where it matters most. Children suffer the consequences of hunger, undernutrition, collapsing educational systems, overstretched healthcare and fragile living conditions. Across many regions, including parts of Europe, basic infrastructures that sustain modern life are strained or breaking, from food production and water systems to schools, hospitals and community services. These failures undermine the ability of adults and institutions to teach, heal and protect. Strengthening one health therefore requires rebuilding human capacity through open knowledge, resilient infrastructures and equitable access to powerful tools, ensuring that even under conditions of scarcity, the adults responsible for safeguarding children can act with competence, clarity and dignity.
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Today and tomorrow, I am preparing the slides for our action research network systems presentation for the sessions on Friday 5, Tuesday 8 and Friday 12, delivered through our own open source video-calling BBB deployment at https://tele.health.int.eu.org/done/deal/ . These presentations will introduce the unified infrastructure and must articulate clearly how the technical backbone supports all scientific, pedagogic and organisational aims of the action.
Please, join us in if interested. Following are some thoughts on the new video delving into the human factor and one health, and on the preparations this far, laying a very humble ground work allowing us all to keep on going a bit more ready to thrive.
The world faces acute scarcity, with millions of children experiencing hunger and limited access to education, and teachers overstretched in both low income regions and parts of the EU. Inequalities across the COST area demand a foundation that reaches the most under-served communities rather than relying on commercial systems designed for wealthy institutions. EU BEACON must deploy research grade open technologies capable of functioning under poverty, low bandwidth and institutional fragility, because only open, sovereign infrastructure can scale across diverse conditions. Open systems allow us to bring cutting edge tools to schools, clinics and community centers, enabling them to benefit from the same advanced capabilities used in top tier research. This way of working transform every euro into lasting capacity, creating local jobs and expertise rather than extracting value through licensing fees. Open foundations permit full auditability, continuous improvement, multilingual support and low cost adaptation for one health education and public health priorities. This mode of work ensure sovereignty over data, identity and pedagogy at a time when generative artificial intelligence and other very rapid technological change demand institutional control. By building on GNU Linux and other UNIX based systems, Nextcloud, BigBlueButton, Moodle and others, we place robust, non extractive digital infrastructure into the hands of those who most need it. This approach anchors the action’s responsibility to strengthen society, safeguard future generations and bridge the gap between advanced scientific capabilities and the everyday realities of schools and communities under strain.
With this, we are simply building on the backbone that already powers the World. GNU Linux and UNIX based systems, along with open databases, open programming languages and open orchestration frameworks, are what runs the global internet, the majority of cloud infrastructure, critical banking systems, streaming platforms, medical devices and scientific computing. Commercial services depend on these foundations even when users do not notice it, contributing to them because they cannot operate at scale without their stability and security. By aligning EU BEACON with this same foundation, we future proof the network, ensure compatibility with global standards and create a technological base that can evolve with emerging fields such as AI assisted learning, environmental monitoring and planetary health.
This strategy positions our action research network not as a consumer of technology, but as a contributor to the digital commons. It generates long term value for public institutions, strengthens European digital sovereignty, facilitates law enforcement, and guarantees that the world’s most advanced educational and public health tools remain open, adaptable and accessible to all. By doing so we act responsibly as a genuine excellence driven research network, ensuring that every resource at our disposal strengthens our capabilities, instead of being lost to commercial overhead, enabling us to reach our goals without compromise.
This approach allows us to move beyond constrained tool-sets, to develop bleeding edge technologies, pedagogic materials and public health infrastructures that remain fully under our control, and to lay down an impactful foundation that serves both our societies and our own long term scientific cohesion. Running the entire suite of open source scientific power tools that sustains our network -from real time conferencing to collaborative editing, secure storage, integrated identity, learning management and research grade extensions, and more to come- costs us barely 1200 euros per year in server infrastructure. This is a negligible amount when compared to the escalating licensing fees of commercial platforms, which would drain resources, restrict functionality and block the possibility of improving on the shared power tools. In contrast, our open and sovereign scientific stack offers capabilities that exceed consumer grade services while preserving full control, full extensibility and both commercial and publicly available pedagogic value for societal sustainability.
Marginalization and chronic lack of resources weaken not only individuals but entire systems across Europe and beyond. Many schools, clinics, universities and public administrations remain dependent on costly proprietary platforms that drain already scarce budgets, limit digital autonomy and push institutions into long term dependency on multinationals whose priorities do not align with public needs. This dependence locks organizations into expensive cycles of renewal, narrows their technological options and sets the bar permanently low, denying them the chance to build capacities that would allow real improvement. Research institutions themselves are often forced into consumer grade tools that are inadequate for scientific work, leaving them unable to innovate or share knowledge openly. In this environment, reclaiming technological power is not an abstract ideal but a practical necessity. Open, sovereign infrastructure gives our institutions, governments, schools and healthcare systems the means to act with agency rather than submission, to direct their own futures rather than renting access to someone else’s vision. It allows public actors to preserve their resources, build local expertise, protect their data and operate with the dignity and autonomy required to serve society effectively.
By committing to this path, we refuse to accept the structural weakness imposed by dependency and instead build the conditions for a stronger, fairer and more resilient future. We either reclaim our technological sovereignty now or continue bleeding resources into systems that hold us back. Children needs to learn how to master both the software and the hardware, as well as scientific and engineering methods to ensure prosperity. One health education cannot flourish atop fragile, commercial infrastructures that exclude those who most need protection. The human factor cannot be strengthened through tools that treat learners and communities as commodities. A healthy society demands technological foundations that serve every child, every school, every clinic, not just those who can pay. We either build systems that safeguard life, knowledge and dignity, or we perpetuate the conditions that erode them. We rather choose wisely the infrastructure that properly empowers humanity, rather than setting the stage for more dependency.
I hope you enjoy the new video released today. The slides will be soon shared on our servers' own Nextcloud instance, available at: https://nextcloud.health.int.eu.org/
Thanks for reading. Wishing you all the very best!
