Blog/en/2026-10-29-Numerikissimo-Interview

💡 In simple words: Théo answered three questions for a website that introduces the people of the digital world. He explains WikiDeal, free software, wikis, and the Ynternet.org Foundation.

🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): Excerpt from an interview given by Théo Bondolfi to David Fayon for Numerikissimo, the directory of leading figures of the French-speaking Web (Numerikissimo). The original answers were written in French, without the use of AI; this is an English translation.

Published on 29 October 2026. Interview by David Fayon (www.davidfayon.fr) for Numerikissimo.

Translated from the original French answers, which were written without AI — a few typos were deliberately left in the original, as a wink to the humans who would read it.

WikiDeal

You developed the WikiDeal project. Could you introduce it? And in the age of generative AI, what is its value proposition and its differentiation?

It is the foundation's new and main project, nourished by nearly 30 years of field experience. Its three slogans: fair deals for nice people; the Wikipedia of trade; cheaper and more flexible.

WikiDeal is built on a fundamental and applied research question that is very concrete: Can users own, run and sustain a global marketplace?

In time, WikiDeal could thus become a vast incubator of marketplaces, with transactional rules that build trust and transcend both cultural and political borders. It is also a healthy way to relocate our economies without depending on large commercial organisations or public institutions — with smooth, easy-going negotiations and flexible, affordable solutions. A trust lever to dare to diversify one's purchases and to start offering services, bringing together small players in an honest, fair environment, with fast and easy conflict resolution, help to get started, traceability of transactions AND privacy protection. It is therefore an aggregator of micro-entrepreneurial initiatives — as if we gathered all the independent book sellers on a single platform, each with their logo, their prices, their market segment, but with common ethical management rules (shipping, payment, dispute resolution, privacy...). It is, in short, a trust generator, at a time when we badly need it. And everything is based on contracts, at the heart of the "deal".

More broadly, human society has now tested, for 20-30 years, free digital services such as Amazon or Facebook, where the user is the merchandise, where profits essentially go to shareholders, forgetting the mutualist movement, cooperatives, and the rules for the use of the commons (like water and air).

And despite the concentration of digital power, public-interest foundations such as Mozilla, Wikimedia or Debian (which distributes GNU/Linux to Ubuntu and others) have emerged, resisted the low blows of the giants of the speculative economy, and remain beacons in this opaque digital era. Globalised markets are increasingly strained, and the gap keeps widening between a minority of the ultra-rich and the majority struggling to make ends meet.

So launching WikiDeal by removing indecent commissions and shareholder profits, with a platform that is easy to use thanks to an in-house AI helping users carry out their transactions, reach agreement, trust each other, easily, at low cost and with more flexibility — that is a bet worth taking, a source of hope worth nurturing.

Wikipedia took off fairly quickly. In less than 5 years it was THE world's number-one reference for knowledge (source: Nature and Science, 2005-2006 studies). So who knows what lies ahead for WikiDeal in the world of trade? In any case there is a fine team to get started, and since there are many legal aspects to opening up new non-speculative and redistributive paths, it will take a few more years to open to the world. We are aiming for a full opening (anyone can launch their transport, housing, freelance service...) around 2028-2029 — time will tell!

Free software and wiki culture

What is your vision of two facets of the digital world — free software on one hand and wikis on the other? What have they contributed against the centralisation of power by the GAFAM, and to keep the original spirit of the early Internet?

Free software licences and the wiki are two products of the same dynamic: the one arising from the fundamental properties of the digital. TCP/IP, HTML/W3C, blockchain too, and even generic medicines and the protection of the right to access seeds, all stem — in my view — from this same reality: an obvious, decentralised, instantaneous foundation.

According to the vast majority of scientific research on the "commons", notably the extensions of economist Elinor Ostrom's work on the participatory management of rivers and forests, this trend can be defined in 8 points, which we find both in free software and in wiki culture (symbolised by its main engine, Wikipedia), and which I would summarise as follows:

Adapted rules: tailor-made tools and licences.
Clearly defined boundaries: a clear perimeter for the community.
Participation in the rules: governance by the contributors.
Mutual monitoring: transparency and auditing (of code, of accounts...).
Graduated sanctions: proportionate moderation of behaviour.
Conflict resolution: accessible mediation processes.
Recognition of rights: autonomy of the community vis-à-vis the founders.
Nested organisation: decentralised and specialised projects.

If we ultimately consider the GAFAM to be a youthful mistake of human society — just as selling cars without a licence or a highway code was a youthful mistake in the automotive field — we can better see the bigger picture emerging: a human society where the Internet keeps its original promises of equal opportunity, and acknowledges having temporarily gone astray with a concentration of power and rather questionable, unsustainable algorithmic uses.

The Ynternet.org Foundation

Could you describe the Ynternet.org Foundation, its history, its missions and its achievements since its creation? How does it help develop a certain idea of a citizen and open Internet?

Ynternet.org was created — for once — at the invitation of delegates from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in 1998. For its first 10 years, it mostly carried out North/South cooperation projects, in Africa, with an intention of sharing, solidarity and equal opportunity for social, cultural and ecological micro-entrepreneurs. It gradually brought together players from the free-culture and commons world, to jointly run scientific and educational research programmes, always around the dimension of the "free" — in the sense of the four fundamental freedoms for "functional" content: the freedoms to access, use, modify and redistribute content. By "functional", as distinct from opinion content (arts, ideas), we mean precisely recipes, manuals, definitions, ways of doing things, and software code...

Concretely, the Ynternet.org Foundation's team — always made up of 2-5 intrapreneurs and a Board that supports it strategically in its mission — has carried out around fifty international projects in nearly 30 years, mixing courses for various audiences, scientific publications and events in Switzerland, notably the eCulture Forum and 22 editions of TEDxGeneva since 2013. On average, we run 2-4 EU research projects in parallel, lasting 2-3 years each on average, with partners from all over Europe. See details on www.ynternet.org.

Also published on the WikiDeal site. Interview by David Fayon for Numerikissimo.