NGI Commons On the Road: Reflections on recent Digital Commons events in Europe
In last week’s article on our NGI Workshop, we asked the questions: What are digital commons? And how could we possibly co-create Europe’s digital future by developing shared, public interest digital resources and infrastructures?
While we offered some initial reflections on these questions from workshop and recent General Assembly (GA) meetings, these were not the only events that took place in recent weeks to capture the enthusiasm and momentum taking place around digital commons. In recent weeks, we also attended the Digital Commons Policy Council (DCPC) Policy Lab in Paris (May 30-31), the PublicSpaces Conference in Amsterdam (June 6-7, after our workshop) and the Mozilla Festival (MozFest) House Amsterdam in Amsterdam (June 11-13).
This article will capture some of the key insights from each of these events and connect them to the outcomes of the other meetings. We will also share some relevant examples of digital commons emerging in practice and future considerations for our own work.
What happened the last few weeks?
DCPC Policy Lab
On May 30th and 31st, consortium members Open Future (OF) and OpenForum Europe (OFE) participated in a Policy Lab on public support for the Digital Commons, organised by the DCPC. The DCPC is a body which aims to increase recognition of the digital commons and the voluntary work that creates these common goods in France and beyond. The lab brought together experts to share experiences, presented their work, and discussed long-term challenges and opportunities.
The event was a natural fit for our consortium. As summarised on their website, OF are currently mapping existing policies that contribute to the development of Digital Commons and consulting various stakeholders via NGI Commons. To this end, the main goal of the Policy Lab was to define best practices and tools to increase cooperation between public institutions and Digital Commons projects. Examples provided included government-led commons initiatives during emergencies (for example, Italy’s open-source Covid contact-tracing app), academic-government collaboration projects (e.g., UK’s Data Trusts project), and public funding opportunities (e.g., France’s Call for Commons or Appels à communs).
Following the discussions that took place during the lab, participants decided to split into three areas of work: Public Support Best Practices, Policy Proposals Mapping, and a Guide to Public Procurement. You can find a summary of these ideas and activities here.
The event was enlightening as to the real perspectives of commoners and their opportunities for interacting with policymakers, a process we at NGI Commons remain eager to follow. The DCPC plans to organise a follow-up event in the fall of 2025 to continue bringing together researchers and practitioners working on the Digital Commons and to develop new opportunities for collaboration, which we plan to actively participate in, feeding in lessons learned and emerging good practices from our research and convening.
PublicSpaces Conference
The PublicSpaces Conference is a new conference, launched in 2021 by the PublicSpaces Foundation, a coalition of some 70+ public organisations working together on a digital ecosystem based on public values. The conference, now in its fourth year, was held at the Parkhuis de Zwijger on June 6th and 7th and convened a range of public interest technologists across a range of domains and disciplines under roof.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Taking Back the Internet!” and highlighted a range of themes, withDigital Commons as the main theme of the conference. Examples were highlighted repeatedly of how Digital Commons as common goods help manifest many of the possibilities inherent at the heart of the European digital agenda. In some of the sessions, examples of Digital Commons from the education and media spaces were highlighted, as were emerging innovations like PubHubs and many others.
One of the main sessions of the conference was a flagship keynote by Francesca Bria called “Europe’s Path to Innovation in Public Interest” and a subsequent panel discussion “Digital Commons to Realise Europe’s Digital Ambitions”. Francesca is participating in the NGI Commons consortium as a member of our Strategic Advisory Panel (SAP), and her intervention highlighted the scale of the investment and funding challenge needed to be addressed in order to promote Europe’s goals around digital sovereignty and public administration. The EU’s mindset and different model of digital transformation – with focus on regulation and centered around people’s needs – was highlighted as a potential competitive advantage.
The subsequent panel, moderated by one of our consortium members, Open Future’s Director of Policy, Paul Keller, highlighted a number of areas in which digital commons are helping Europe to achieve these positions, linking in concrete examples of work being done under the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC) for Digital Commons and by actors in places like Germany’s ZenDis office, and the citizen coalition “People vs Big Tech” and its related campaign.
MozFest House Amsterdam
Also in Amsterdam at the Tolhuistuin venue where we held our workshop was another edition of Mozilla Festival: MozFest House Amsterdam. A celebration of the potential for a more democratic and open digital world, the event served as ‘a vibrant convergence of minds, a celebration of creativity, and a catalyst for change in the digital world’.
While Digital Commons was not a main theme of the event, the Digital Commons message did resonate with audiences interested in discussions around building unified and democratic digital futures. Members of the NGI Commons consortium Nicholas Gates and Jan Krewer put together a panel discussion on ‘Digital Commons as Infrastructure: Emerging Use Cases’, with Nick moderating the panel. The discussion included consortium partner Paul Keller of Open Future, Sophie Bloemen (a DCTF member) of the Commons Network, Daniel Brumund of GIZ, and Sean Bohan of the OpenWallet Foundation.
Paul Keller framed the conversation by highlighting some of the work we are doing on NGI Commons and how that is situated in a broader context of debates around public digital infrastructure and service delivery. Paul mentioned that there is a big risk of open approaches being captured by Big Tech companies, giving the example of Big Tech investing in the OpenWallet Foundation. He explained on what principles Public Digital Infrastructure should be built to avoid some of these risks: funded publicly, democratically controlled, open source, decentralized and interoperable. with Sophie Bloemen offering additional reflections on these topics, highlighting the existential risks for the state.
Daniel Brumund and Sean Bohan added color to these discussions by adding in lessons from their institutions GIZ and OpenWallet Foundation, as well as highlighting concrete examples of commons as infrastructure from domains like AI and digital wallets. Daniel mentioned that GIZ learned to focus on equity and detach itself from strict openness for instance. In this vein, digital commons is interesting as a concept to GIZ because it focuses rather on governance than on openness. Sean Bohan mentions the example of digital wallets and the European attempt to create open and interoperable alternatives to the digital wallets of Big Tech. Governments are key allies of open source communities, because they can drive the deployment and adoption of open source solutions.
What does this all mean for our work on digital commons?
Events like these bring together some of the most important elements of what we strive to do through NGI Commons. They bring commoners and policymakers together under the same roof, in order to share emerging ideas, technologies and perspectives regarding Digital Commons. While we have been able to facilitate some of these discussions via our own workshop, these events gave a lot of evidence of debates around Digital Commons happening organically.
We were particularly inspired by some of the discussions at the PublicSpaces conference, which centered Digital Commons prominently and highlighted the extent to which the Digital Commons discourse has taken root in the digital cultures of the Netherlands, France and other countries, many of which are involved in the emerging Digital Commons EDIC. Many of the discussions shared positive examples of projects, such as Open Food Facts or PubHubs, which are beginning to test out new governance and contribution models which help improve the development, maintenance and use of those projects at scale.
Another project, the French citizen initiative accelerator, demonstrated how an incubator can build partnerships between public institutions and citizen-commoners projects, for example Pyronear, Umap, PrimTux and others. This model offers a potential learning opportunity for public institutions interested in providing technical and legal assistance to digital commons projects as well as matching them with relevant funding sources.
Some challenges were highlighted at PublicSpaces as well. For example, Alexis Kauffmann from the Ministry of Education in France noted that there is still a lack of European collaboration on open education tools in his field, even while there are opportunities for a lot of synergies. And Mathilde Sanders from PubHubs noted how while governance is an important and necessary part of commons, the lack of public investment in their project was a huge barrier to it being governed and sustained as a digital commons.
Elsewhere, the DCPC Policy Lab was impressive in the way it brought a breathtaking range of experts in this space together for unique policy discussions on Digital Commons which are not yet happening anywhere else. While it remains to be seen how the findings of the workshop will be used, the initial findings (summarized on their website) suggest a lot of thought being given to the specific public policies and public support modalities needed to make Digital Commons viable alternatives for public sector institutions in particular.
NGI Commons is constantly exploring emerging perspectives on Digital Commons and brings concrete examples forward.Events express community engagement around NGI Commons. Our consortium partners look forward to attending more events like these in the months ahead, in order to seize on new opportunities to engage with the community and bring these fruitful discussions together with their own research and advocacy.
Stay tuned for more!