April provides a framework to pool together and leverage our small individual actions

The information technologies are too new for society to really understand the underlying issues. It will take time, even a generation, for everyone to understand how the digital revolution is impacting our every-day lives and the organization of society. If you had asked a contemporary of Gutenberg how printing could change society, he would not have imagined the newspapers, magazines and books in general circulation; at most he would have imagined copies of manuscript amongst the elite who used them at the time. Today is the same with information technology and especially with Free Software. We see them through our current benchmarks, those of the industrial society. But the intangible follows an entirely different logic: to give is to enrich oneself, to share is to receive. Since the general interest gains from it, new business models are yet to be invented. April has been working for over ten years to convince society and policymakers that something is at work in the area of the intangible, especially Free Softwares. It goes through an effort of raising awareness, informing and influencing to help them understand the challenges of this new "knowledge society" to be. These challenges are: why the legislation needs to improve, why software patents are not an appropriate tool, why Free Software is a chance to build a new economy in which France can beat the international competition, why the government would win to build their information systems on Free Software. Great works always begin with small actions. April provides a framework to pool together and leverage our small individual actions. It's an amplifier.