Autonomy in a box - How a small NGO tries to become technologically independent of big tech. EuroBSDCon 2025

"Echtzeit - Digitale Kultur" (https://www.echtzeitkultur.org) is a small Swiss NGO created to aid the demoscene (https://demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net/the-demoscene). As many organizations, we wish to not further rely on the SaaS solutions by too-big-to-fail technology providers. With around 10 active and 100 passive members, our resources - time, money and capabilities - are severely limited. This talk presents how we built our own infrastructure based on FreeBSD, Jails, PF, ZFS and other OSS and goes into the challenges - some technical, but most organizational and financial - that we faced by this approach as well as the benefits. The talk further lays out how we wish to share our acquired know-how with other NGOs to enable them to gain digital autonomy themselves.