Throughout my life I’ve helped start more initiatives than I can count on one hand. Off the top of my head, I can name at least ten: a discussion group (Utopía), political organisations (Movimiento de Acción Librepensadora, Sociedad de Unión y Resistencia, Pencopolitania), artistic collectives (La Amante Sofista, Turba Machina), an observatory (Observatorio Laico), a news-and-literature archive (Ateneo Quemanta), a study centre linked to a student union (CEFEC), and a political magazine (Heterodoxia). And I’m sure I’m forgetting a few.

Only the last one still exists. The rest dissolved for one reason or another—and I’m genuinely fine with that. If anything, I take it as evidence of a different measure of success. I’ve always thought voluntary participation is the core of any meaningful organisation. If people no longer see a purpose, there’s no point in holding them in place. There should be no room for coercion, especially in small, well-intentioned projects.

It’s also been a few years since I last helped found anything. I moved to Sweden for a master’s degree, worked as a research assistant, then did my PhD, and now work as a researcher. Somewhere along the way, that old itch began to return. It came together with a renewed interest in anarchism. And if anarchism is anything, it is something you do with what is within reach.

At the same time, my interest in free and open-source software has been growing. I’ve become increasingly aware of how closely it intersects with my daily work, and with the conditions under which academic work happens at all. Universities today do not merely “use” digital tools; they depend on digital infrastructure to function—research, teaching, administration, everything. When that infrastructure is controlled by profit-driven tech giants (most of them based in the US), the risks are not only financial or technical. Control over infrastructure shapes what can be done, what can be measured, what can be enforced, and what can be refused. It affects scientific autonomy and academic freedom in ways we rarely name, because these digital tools have become taken for granted.

That intersection is where FOSSFORUS.watch begins. The project is a small attempt to bring these issues to the surface: to track news and scholarly literature on FOSS adoption in universities, to add context when it matters, and to document the harms of proprietary lock-in as they mount.

You can read more about the project at FOSSFORUS.watch.