We recently joined Dweb Camp, the annual gathering organised by the Internet Archive’s Dweb team, this year held for the first time in Europe. It brought together an extraordinary mix of people working on decentralised, community-owned alternatives to the extractive tech of BigTech platforms. For FKI and the wider DTF network — Commons Network, Fundación Platoniq/Goteo.org, the Civic Interaction Design lab at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and many others — this was a chance to present the DTF prototype to a broader international community, and to take the next concrete steps together.

A camp built by its own community

The event took place at Alte Hölle (“Old Hell”), a forest site in the former East Germany that was once used by the Stasi and is now run as a self-organised collective of artists and hackers. Around thirty people live there year-round, supported by a much wider community, and the site is regularly opened up to likeminded collectives for festivals and hacker camps.

Getting there was already part of the experience: a bus organised by SoliBus, a volunteer collective that provides transport for antifascist and antiauthoritarian movements, carried us from Berlin to the camp. Conversations started before we even arrived — people from Transition Towns in Portugal, from the agroecology movement, and from collective funding initiatives such as FLOAT were all on board.

On site, some of us pitched tents while others took up ready-made glamping tents. Sessions ran across several venues — the main event tents, the hotel building, the “AI Barn” and the “Forest Pavilion” among them. The opening session, led by Wendy, mai and Brewster from the Dweb team, set the tone by asking everyone to get to know their neighbours and share why they had come.

The camp ran on its own volunteer infrastructure. Well over a hundred people signed up through LinkedOut, a volunteer coordination platform (no relation to LinkedIn), to take on tasks from washing dishes to setting up chairs. Each evening, small “weaving groups” gathered after dinner to reflect on the day and decide together what to discuss next.

Presenting and prototyping the DTF

Why had we come? To bring the community building the Democratic Tech Fund together with this wider network, and to co-create its next steps. Since a working session at Internet Archive Europe’s Amsterdam headquarters in February (see this thread), the DTF had moved from concept into prototype. Dweb Camp was the moment to present that prototype and invite people to join the next phase, as the fund prepares to go live (session).

We were joined by Sophie from Commons Network, Olivier from Fundación Platoniq/Goteo.org, Martijn from the Civic Interaction Design research group, several people from the Co-op Cloud Federation, Ela and Andreas from Platform Coops Germany, Michael from Newsmast Foundation, and many others we expect to keep working with closely.

On Thursday, the new DTF website launched with a short session addressing the basics: why the fund exists, what “Democratic Tech” means, the problem it is trying to address, how it works, and who it is for. By the end, people at least had a clear answer to what the acronym stands for.

On Friday, Ela and Andreas facilitated a session on P2P financing and the solidarity economy, drawing on their own experience and prompting discussion about what it could mean for our own projects (session). Straight after, Olivier led a governance role-play (session): Martijn presented a project and walked a set of stakeholders — in a format inspired by baseball — through their asks and contributions. We then discussed what each stakeholder would bring to the DTF, and what stake in its governance they would like. The session generated rich input that will feed directly into the next phase of governance design.

Together, these sessions leave us with the pieces needed to start collectively funding programmes — enabling communities in the cooperative social and solidarity economy, and communities most exposed within authoritarian tech spaces (social networks, cloud platforms), to build their own spaces: Connected Community Spaces and Collaborative Workspaces, as described in the case stories on the new DTF website. The first programmes being prepared are outlined in the Intro document, reachable via the QR code on our flyer.

Lessons from Goteo, and from the field

Goteo’s experience is a stepping stone for the DTF. On Saturday, in the Sustaining Infrastructure Movements session, Olivier shared some of those lessons: over €25 million in donations distributed to thousands of collective projects, building resistance, collective memory and popular capacity across the social and solidarity economy. One of the DTF’s first programmes, led by Fundación Platoniq, is ARCHICARE — building collective archives for and by feminist collectives working on resistance, memory and care.

Conversations throughout the camp also turned to civic-public-private partnerships. Rather than the privatisation of public services often carried out under that name, several of us argued for civic and commons-based forms of collaboration that meet local needs directly and avoid extractive economics. As Andreas pointed out, more than 80% of local economic activity is currently extracted to shareholders far removed from the communities generating it — hardly a foundation for local sustainability in a time of ecological, social and political crisis. “Local First” came up repeatedly as a serious demand, with many at the camp working on the social and technical infrastructure — peer-to-peer, distributed or decentralised, owned by the users and communities of a given place — that could support it.

We also met many technologists building genuinely good tools on the assumption that “the users will come” — a risky bet, however solid the code or the open-source credentials. As Michael Foster of Newsmast Foundation put it, the answer isn’t to impose a single technical recipe on everyone either: rather than pushing Mastodon servers on every community, Newsmast has built a community-curated news feed on top of Mastodon that gives community media the reach and usability of well-funded commercial platforms (see the related use-case story on the DTF website). At the same time, “Not Invented Here” thinking does real damage: too often, new projects are started to solve problems that existing open-source tools already address, when a bit more networking and shared awareness could have avoided the duplicated effort.

That tension — translating real user needs into existing open-source solutions, acknowledging that change is hard, and finding ways to resource teams to drive it together with communities that want it — was a recurring theme. We closed one of the last sessions with the question: can we catalyse a decent movement? Decent values, decentralised architectures, and “good enough for now, safe enough to try” as a working pattern.

At the Demo Night Market we stood together with @fauno of Sutty and @iexos to represent the Co-op Cloud Federation - the network that shares the burden of deploying and maintaining around a hundred mature web applications. A very decent way to make reuse easier and avoid reinventing so many wheels.

Closing the camp

In the breakout time that followed, some started planning how to keep meeting, online and in person — possibly via a platform called Work Adventure — while others made music with improvised instruments. At the closing party, one of the better ideas of the week was to donate unused drink tokens to a box at the bar, so that anyone could collect a free drink.

Our thanks go to the Internet Archive and the Dweb team for organising such a well-run gathering, and for bringing it to Europe this year. We also want to thank the Department of Decentralisation (DoD) — the on-the-ground volunteer organisation that brought Freifunk and many other collective infrastructure projects together to keep the camp connected — and the C-Base community, whose Berlin space is well worth a visit for anyone wanting to play games in a spaceship among fellow hackers.

We need to stay connected to push back against authoritarianism, here, there and everywhere. Onwards, together.

• Wouter Tebbens (president),
• Hinde ten Berge (treasurer),
• David Jacovkis (secretary),
• Marco Fioretti, and
• Mike Hales.

Wouter Tebbens

Co-founder and serves as president of the Free Knowledge Institute… (continues here).

David Jacovkis

Co-founder of the Free Knowledge Institute and responsible for its IT infrastructure… (continues here)

Hinde ten Berge </strong>

Co-founder of the Free Knowledge Institute and is responsible for the financial management…(continues here)

Marco Fioretti

Freelance writer, populariser, activist and teacher specialised in open digital standards…(continues here)

Mike Hales

Organiser on the resurgent power of commoning – Eldership & deep time, living economy & tools for conviviality…(continues here)

Previous contributors and team members

Monica Garriga Miret is a law graduate, worked as a foreign correspondent in South East Asia, Australia and the South Pacific and later specialised in Communication and Multi-platform and Transmedia with the aim to looking into ways of using journalism/communication for the audiences to generate change themselves. Monica worked in the Catalan FKI team and co-founded the femProcomuns cooperative, working on Teixidora an La Comunificadora.

David Gmez Fontanills has co-produced La Comunificadora, is an activist and promoter of free licenses, and is producing Teixidora, an initiative to track, document and connect techno-social activity in the area of Barcelona. With the collective “TAG Taller dIntangibles” he has promoted networked participatory projects, such as HKP, about technological appropriation and other artistic activities. He also promoted PliegOs.net self-publishing initiative. He has worked on several semantic wiki platforms for education, such as Viquilletra, wiki EOI and Experimenta_wiki. With Amical Wikimedia he has promoted the wikiArS initiative to encourage participation of art schools in Wikipedia. He is an external collaborator at UOC, has a degree in Fine Arts and Master in Knowledge Society.

[← View the session announcement] [▶ Watch the recording] · [📄 Read the slides] · [📝 Read the transcription]

Two weeks after our community call with LaSuite.coop showed what a cooperative model for public-sector cloud services could look like at national scale, we turned to the other end of the telescope: what does sovereign digital infrastructure look like for a volunteer fire brigade, a queer youth organisation, or a local environmental network — groups with no IT department, minimal budgets, and real needs?

The answer, it turns out, is KolliCloud. And it is already running.

Who Is Behind It

KolliCloud is developed by Local-IT e.V., a small non-profit association based in Germany with around 35 members and six part-time positions. Local-IT’s mission is digital sovereignty and free software for civil society, pursued along two programme lines: education and community-building events (including their annual Barcamp), and free-software development for NGOs — of which KolliCloud is the flagship project.

The fact that Local-IT is itself a Verein — a German registered association, the same organisational form as most of their users — is not incidental. It means they are building for a use case they live every day. As Simon, who presented at the session, put it: “We are an association, so we are using the tools ourselves and providing tools for other associations. It’s easier to provide tools for a use case quite similar to our own.”

Nothing in the architecture prevents KolliCloud from serving other types of organisation — cooperatives, social enterprises, municipalities — and Local-IT is open to this where values align. But the association world is their home ground, and Germany has an enormous number of them.

What KolliCloud Is

KolliCloud is a ready-to-use integrated hosting toolkit for clubs, NGOs, and collectives. In practical terms it is a curated bundle of approximately fifteen free-software applications — Nextcloud, Authentik, Element/Matrix, Wekan, OnlyOffice, Vikunja, Vaultwarden, and others — deployed as a single integrated platform with single sign-on (SSO), automated backups, and monitoring included from the first minute.

That last sentence is worth dwelling on. SSO across fifteen applications — meaning one account, one login, one dashboard for everything — is the kind of thing that, if you have ever tried to set it up yourself, you know is fiendishly fiddly. It is one of the main reasons organisations stay on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 despite wanting to leave: the alternative is not technically impossible, it is just time-consumingly difficult to wire together. KolliCloud makes it a non-issue.

Three deployment models are offered:

Self-hosting — you run it on your own infrastructure, using Local-IT’s public configuration repositories and guides (currently in German; English translation is in progress).

Managed hosting — Local-IT runs and maintains it for you at a subscription of €20–€200 per month (averaging around €60/month per instance, partly co-funded by public grants). For a small association, this is genuinely affordable.

Collective hosting — a middle path in which infrastructure is shared across organisations and co-governed by multiple admins. More on this below.

The Technical Secret: Building on the Configuration Commons

KolliCloud does not exist in isolation. It is built deliberately and explicitly on top of the Co-op Cloud Federation’s configuration commons — the shared ecosystem of community-maintained application recipes and the abra deployment tool that the federation has developed collectively.

Co-op Cloud solved the question of “how do I install one app” by building a commons of deployment configurations that any operator can use and contribute to. KolliCloud takes the next step and solves “how do I run all of them together as one coherent platform.” As Local-IT’s slides put it with admirable directness: “Self-hosting doesn’t remove the work — it shifts it.”

What KolliCloud adds on top of Co-op Cloud is a tool called Alakazam — the meta-configuration layer that makes the whole system manageable at scale.

Alakazam: The Orchestration Layer That Changes the Economics

Alakazam is, in Simon’s own description, what you need when “managing dozens of .env files by hand breaks.” Local-IT currently runs around 230 deployed applications across their managed instances. Without Alakazam, updating all of them would require manual intervention on each. With it, the process is a handful of commands.

The key insight behind Alakazam is hierarchical YAML configuration with inheritance. You define defaults once — which apps to deploy, which subdomains to use, SMTP settings, version pins — and each individual instance only needs to specify what differs from those defaults. Crucially, Alakazam also understands combinations: if you declare that an instance should have both Authentik (the SSO provider) and Nextcloud, Alakazam automatically applies the correct integration configuration to both, without you having to look up which environment variables need to match.

The update workflow this enables is genuinely impressive. Local-IT deploys every application upgrade to their staging environment first, lets it run for two weeks, and — if no problems emerge — pushes the update to all production instances with a single command. Moritz ran this process across all 230 applications a month before the session. Total effort: a few hours.

This matters because maintenance cost is usually the killer for small hosting providers and community operators. If upgrading fifty instances takes fifty times the work, it becomes unaffordable. If it takes roughly the same time regardless of instance count, the economics of community hosting transform entirely.

Alakazam has recently been recognised beyond Local-IT’s own operations: the Co-op Cloud Federation passed Federation Resolution 037, formally adopting Alakazam as an official Co-op Cloud project. This is a significant endorsement — it means the wider federation community is invested in developing it further, and that the methodology Local-IT pioneered can propagate across the entire ecosystem.

A Live Deployment — Under Pressure

The session included a live demonstration that became, in the best possible way, an illustration of both the tool’s power and the honest roughness of early-stage infrastructure work.

Simon set out to deploy a fully configured KolliCloud instance for the Democratic Tech Fund — fourteen applications, SSO wired together, backups configured, monitoring in place — live in front of the group. A small incident occurred early on: an ampersand (&) in the initial password caused a parsing error. Once identified and corrected, the deployment continued cleanly. By the end of the session, the instance was running.

The login page appeared at login.dtf.dev.kolli.cloud. Wouter confirmed it was up. The dashboard showed the full suite of applications, accessible through a single account.

Total time from empty server to running platform: under thirty minutes — consistent with Local-IT’s own documented benchmark of under thirty minutes for a new instance including VM, backup, and monitoring. As Simon noted afterwards, this is proof that the system works, while also being honest that it still needs polish before it is fully turnkey for others to operate independently.

Who Is Already Using It

The most vivid example from the session was Lambda Bundesverband — Germany’s largest queer youth organisation, for which they set up the queer support cloud service. The entire organisation has migrated to free tools hosted on KolliCloud. But beyond basic file sharing and communication, their setup demonstrates what integrated sovereign infrastructure can look like in practice: their support service, through which young queer people can reach out for help, runs on a Zammad ticketing system integrated with Matrix/Element and a Signal bridge, so that volunteers respond to support requests directly from their chat client. The whole stack runs on KolliCloud. “KolliCloud solved the hosting problem for a small, financially constrained org,” their contact Valentin said — simply and accurately.

Other users include a volunteer fire brigade and various social organisations, some with over 100 user accounts. The profile is consistently the same: organisations with real collaborative needs, no dedicated IT staff, and a genuine desire to operate on tools they trust and control.

The Collective Hosting Model and Where This Is Heading

Perhaps the most interesting and underdeveloped idea in KolliCloud’s current architecture is the collective hosting model — what Simon described as “the same idea as Co-op Cloud, one layer down.”

Currently, seven members are hosting seven instances on a shared framework, with multiple admins holding access to the same infrastructure. The practical benefit is mutual cover: if one administrator is unavailable, others can step in. As Simon described it: “A couple of people have admin rights and SSH keys on a server with, say, seven VMs. If I’m going on holiday, someone else can help if my community’s infrastructure breaks.” This is the beginnings of federated mutual aid for small-scale hosting, applied not at the application layer (where the federation already operates) but at the infrastructure layer.

The observation that followed from the floor is worth quoting directly: if each community in the network runs a cloud like this, a genuinely federated cloud — distributed, community-governed, resilient — is not far away.

The Economics: Honest Numbers

Local-IT has received approximately €540,000 in development funding since 2021, drawn from German public and civic sources including the Akademie für die ländlichen Räume (rural civic infrastructure programmes), DSEE (Deutsche Stiftung für Engagement und Ehrenamt), Kreis Ostholstein, Stadtwerke Eutin, DigitalHub.SH, and the Fernsehlotterie.

Managed instances are priced at €20–€200 per month, averaging around €60 — though Local-IT estimates they need around 500 instances to sustain two to three part-time positions. They are not there yet. This is the central economic challenge of the cooperative hosting model: the per-unit costs are low, but reaching the scale needed for sustainability requires either many more users, additional grant support, or both. A shared administration model, where hosting responsibility is distributed across a wider community, is one path toward making the economics work without either growing into a large centralised provider or depending indefinitely on project grants.

The question of long-term economic sustainability was raised directly in the Q&A by d1 from Co-op Cloud: “We know the economics of hosting are difficult; we’re approaching some of the most underfunded parts of society and asking them to pay us for something they get ‘for free’. How can we make this sustainable?” Simon’s honest answer: “We need to work on this more.” The mutualization of labour — sharing the operational work across a community of administrators — is seen as a key part of the answer, but it is work in progress.

What Needs to Happen Next

KolliCloud is real, working, and — for the right communities — already deployable today. The self-hosting guides are public; the managed hosting is open; the collective hosting model is being built out. Alakazam is now an official Co-op Cloud project with federation-wide backing.

What the ecosystem still needs, and what the Democratic Tech Fund is trying to help build, is the social infrastructure around the technical one: more operators running KolliCloud clusters, more organisations sharing hosting responsibility, more communities contributing to the Co-op Cloud recipe commons that KolliCloud depends on. When more organisations join, the maintenance does not multiply — that is the whole point of a configuration commons.

The session also surfaced a new project: Mila, Local-IT’s open-source members-management tool for associations, built because existing options are too complex, too expensive, or too rigid. Mila integrates with Authentik via OIDC, supports custom fields, fee tracking, self-service membership applications, role-based access control, and accounting integration — all with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility and a GDPR-first data model. It is in early release and contributions are welcome at git.local-it.org/local-it/mitgliederverwaltung.

Get Involved

If your organisation — or a community you work with — is looking to migrate away from Big Tech tools, or if you are interested in running cooperative cloud infrastructure for others, we encourage you to explore:

• KolliCloud at kollicloud.de — self-hosting guides, managed hosting, and the configuration repositories
• Co-op Cloud at coopcloud.tech — the federation and recipe commons that KolliCloud builds on
• Alakazam at git.coopcloud.tech/toolshed/alakazam — the orchestration layer, now an official federation project
• Mila at git.local-it.org/local-it/mitgliederverwaltung — membership management for associations
• Local-IT directly at info@local-it.org

And if you want to support the broader work of building social capacity for digital autonomy, the Democratic Tech Fund is the place to do it — contributions of any size are welcome at opencollective.com/democratictechfund.

The infrastructure is ready. The community is growing. Another world is not only possible — it is running on a Debian VM with Docker Swarm and fourteen apps behind a single login.

The Free Knowledge Institute community call with KolliCloud and Local-IT took place on 21 May 2026 via Meet.coop, organised with the Democratic Tech Fund and the CoopCloud Federation. Many active members of the Co-op Cloud Federation were present and contributed to the shared notes from which this article draws. The recording, slides, and full transcription are linked above.

This call series is ongoing. If you are building cooperative or commons-based digital infrastructure and would like to present at a future session, get in touch.

We are living through what many in our community have started calling the Digital Coup: the accelerating concentration of digital infrastructure in the hands of a shrinking number of billionaire-controlled corporations, increasingly allied with authoritarian politics. The response cannot simply be better regulation or gentler procurement. It requires an alternative economy — one built on public values, cooperation, and the commons.

That is precisely the spirit behind our regular community call series, and it is why we were delighted to welcome LaSuite.coop as our special guests on 11 May 2026.

The Moment We Are In

The context matters. For the first time in years, there is real political momentum at the European level for breaking with Big Tech dependency. Under the umbrella of the Digital Commons EDIC (European Digital Infrastructure Consortium), France, Germany, the Netherlands, and other member states are collaborating to develop open-source collaborative workspaces for their civil servants: La Suite in France, OpenDesk in Germany, MijnBureau in the Netherlands.

This is not a minor procurement shift. France’s digital infrastructure agency, DINUM, has taken the remarkable step of editing and maintaining free software as a digital common — rather than contracting out to proprietary vendors or even relying on existing open-source projects managed by private entities. Hundreds of thousands of French public agents are already using these tools. Every one hundred day’s sprint, the software takes a significant leap forward.

This changes the economics of cooperative cloud provision. The technical work is increasingly done; the public investment is already flowing. What the ecosystem now needs is the social infrastructure to make it last: hosting cooperatives, training providers, community governance, and — crucially — a replicable organisational model.

Enter LaSuite.coop.

What Is LaSuite.coop?

LaSuite.coop is a multi-stakeholder cooperative being established in France by a consortium of long-standing cooperative actors in the digital space. Its founding members include IndieHosters (free software hosting, over 10 years of experience), Yaal.coop (cooperative software developers), Algoo/Galae (email hosting), and Lebureau.coop (domain names), with further collaboration from Open Source Politics .

The cooperative is currently completing its legal incorporation — the entity will be formally constituted in June 2026 — and is running a public campaign to bring in customers, partners, and supporters as co-owners before launch.

The service is already operational (join as member and/or access their demo). LaSuite.coop offers organisations a complete collaborative workspace built on the tools developed and integrated by DINUM:

• Docs — collaborative document and note editing
• Visio — video conferencing
• Grist — a powerful low-code/no-code spreadsheet and database tool (think Airtable, but open source)
• Element/Matrix — encrypted team chat
• File sharing — sovereign cloud storage (coming soon)
• Mail — hosted email based on Mailcow and SOGo
• Additional tools — password vaults, website hosting, and more

Pricing follows a t-shirt size model (10–25 users, 25–50, 50–150, and above), designed around organisations rather than individual licences, with the explicit intention of avoiding the per-seat nickel-and-diming that makes Microsoft and Google so sticky. For very small groups or those who wish to self-host, the tools are open source and documented — though they require a degree of technical confidence to set up independently.

Why Open Source Alone Is Not Enough

Tim - Timothée Gosselin -, one of LaSuite.coop’s founders, made a point in our community call that deserves to be heard beyond the cooperative tech circles where it is already well understood.

Open source removes technical lock-in. It offers legal freedom and transparency. But it does not, by itself, confer sovereignty. The history of open-source projects is littered with examples of licence changes, community capture, and the slow drift of decision-making power towards whoever controls the funding — not because of bad intentions, but because of misaligned incentives.

“Open source without shared governance is just transparent dependency,” as Tim put it.

What actually determines sovereignty is who decides — who sets the roadmap, who chooses the pricing, who determines which users are served and how. Those decisions are made through governance, not licensing.

LaSuite.coop’s answer is to combine three things that each on their own are insufficient:

1. Free software — for technical freedom and transparency
2. The commons — shared governance over the code itself, independent of any single organisation or state
3. The cooperative model — a business structure whose incentives are aligned with users and workers, not with capital accumulation

This three-part combination is the core of what LaSuite.coop calls its blueprint for European digital sovereignty.

A Governance Model Worth Studying

The cooperative form that LaSuite.coop is adopting is a Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif (SCIC) — a French legal structure requiring both workers and customers to be represented in governance. This is not a common worker co-op, nor a user co-op in the conventional sense. It is a multi-stakeholder structure, and LaSuite.coop has elaborated it further into five membership categories, each with a defined share of voting power:

• Service operators (IndieHosters, developers, trainers, support) — 30%
• Organisational customers — 20%
• Individual customers — 20%
• Strategic partners (organisations connected to the ecosystem) — 20%
• Supporters — 10%

The design principle is clear: the largest share of decision-making power sits with those who produce and those who use the service — not with investors, not with the state, not with a founding clique. There is no single actor who can decide unilaterally.

Crucially, the cooperative intends to dedicate a share of its revenues back to the upstream commons — contributing financially to La Suite’s development, funding community events and hackathons, and participating in the governance of the common codebase itself. LaSuite.coop is not a free rider on the public investment that made these tools possible; it aims to be a net contributor.

Built to Be Replicated

Perhaps the most significant aspect of LaSuite.coop, from the perspective of the broader cooperative tech movement, is that it is designed from the outset to be copied.

The technical infrastructure (open source, documented), the organisational model (the SCIC structure with its membership categories and governance rules), the economic model (t-shirt pricing, revenue redistribution, no venture capital) — all of it is being developed transparently and will be shared publicly. As Tim said: “We hope others can try on their side and we can learn together from our mistakes and our successes.”

This is not a French project that happens to use open-source tools. It is a blueprint that could be adopted in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, or anywhere else where the political and technical conditions are ripening. The Digital Commons EDIC provides a European-level coordination layer. The CoopCloud Federation provides a technical commons of cloud operators. What is needed now is the proliferation of LaSuite.coop-style cooperative service providers across the continent, working together as an ecosystem rather than competing as isolated startups.

The risk is real and Tim named it plainly: DINUM could face a change in political direction; funding could be cut; the private software lobby — which is already pushing back hard against La Suite as “unfair competition” — could win ground. The resilience of the commons depends on building an ecosystem of actors, cooperative and civic, whose existence does not depend on any single government’s goodwill.

What This Means for Us

At the Free Knowledge Institute, we have been working for twenty years on the mission of spreading free knowledge models and democratic tech — technology cared for by the communities it serves. We co-founded CommonsCloud.Coop in Barcelona. We were among the first members of Meet.coop. We are co-initiators of the Democratic Tech Fund, a bottom-up collective fund for the transition to digital autonomy.

We see LaSuite.coop as exactly the kind of initiative the Democratic Tech Fund exists to support and connect. The question is not whether this model is the right one. The question is whether we can move fast enough, and build collectively enough, to make it viable at the scale it needs to reach.

Let Us Know Your Interest

We want to build on the momentum of this community call. Specifically, we are exploring:

• Replication of the LaSuite.coop model in other European countries — whether as national cooperatives, regional networks, or sector-specific instances (media, civil society, education, local government)
• Collective funding through the Democratic Tech Fund to support the social infrastructure — community management, onboarding support, governance design — that cooperative cloud providers need to grow
• A shared roadmap connecting LaSuite.coop, the CoopCloud Federation, Lokal-IT, KolliCloud, and other emerging cooperative cloud providers into a genuinely interoperable European ecosystem.

If you are running or planning a cooperative or commons-based digital infrastructure project, if your organisation is looking to move away from Big Tech tools and wants to do so collectively, or if you simply want to support this work — we want to hear from you.

Get in touch via the Democratic Tech Fund, join the conversation in our Matrix space (look for the Our Desk channel), or follow us on the Fediverse. You can also support the Democratic Tech Fund directly via Open Collective.

The tools are ready. The model is proven. What we need now is the collective will to build it — together.

The Free Knowledge Institute community call with LaSuite.coop took place on 11 May 2026 via Meet.coop, organised with the Democratic Tech Fund and the CoopCloud Federation. The recording and transcription are available.

This call series is irregular, but ongoing. Our next session — featuring Lokal-IT and KolliCloud — takes place on 21 May 2026 at 14:00 CEST via Meet.coop.

Acknowledgements

My thankfulness goes to Sophie Bloemen for her review of this article and her many suggestions for improvement. Also Mike Hales has enriched this work through the many conversations we’ve been having over the years about commoning, about tooling for organisers and economic democracy. With both I share a long time thinking of the possibility of organising a democratic tech fund. And of course to all who are participating in the many intersectional communities doing their part to make this world a better place from the bottom-up, using technology, not on their, but on our terms.

Introduction

With authoritarian politics increasingly aligning with tech billionaires—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel amongst others—our democratic societies face unprecedented risks. Democratic technology offers a counter-vision: technology that supports democracy, that can be owned by communities, and through which we can shape our lives collectively rather than being subjected to extractive systems that increasingly put life on earth at risk.

Whilst the term “democratic tech” has risen rapidly in recent times, particularly as society awakens to its counterpart—authoritarian tech—its intellectual roots run deep. More importantly, various communities use the term with different meanings and connotations. This article traces the history of democratic technology, explores its contemporary applications, and articulates our position on what democratic tech means in the struggle against platform capitalism.

Historical Foundations and Key Thinkers

Lewis Mumford: Authoritarian versus Democratic Technics

Lewis Mumford, sociologist and philosopher of technology, provided one of the earliest and most influential conceptualisations in his 1964 essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.”¹ Mumford distinguished between two fundamental approaches to technology: authoritarian technics, characterised by centralised control and large-scale systems, versus democratic technics, which he defined as:

the small-scale method of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature.

Around this central principle of democracy—giving final authority to the whole rather than the part, to living human beings rather than institutions—Mumford identified a constellation of related ideas and practices: communal self-government, free communication amongst equals, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and individual moral responsibility for behaviour affecting the whole community.

Mumford observed that “democracy is necessarily most visible in relatively small communities and groups, whose members meet frequently face to face, interact freely, and are known to each other as persons.” He warned that “as soon as large numbers are involved, democratic association must be supplemented by a more abstract, depersonalised form.” Presciently, he noted that “it is much easier to wipe out democracy by an institutional arrangement that gives authority only to those at the apex of the social hierarchy than it is to incorporate democratic practices into a well organised system under centralised direction.”

Andrew Feenberg: Critical Theory of Technology

Andrew Feenberg emerged as a central figure in contemporary philosophy of technology, developing what he calls “Critical Theory of Technology” in the 1990s. Feenberg argued that democratising technology means expanding technological design to include alternative interests and values. He asserted that this must be achieved through consumer intervention in a liberated design process.

From his book Transforming Technology, Feenberg writes:

What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements. The design of technology is thus an ontological decision fraught with political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from participation in this decision is profoundly undemocratic.²

Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons

Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, fundamentally challenged the dominant narrative of the “tragedy of the commons” through her groundbreaking 1990 work Governing the Commons.³ She demonstrated through extensive empirical research that communities can successfully self-organise and self-govern common resources without requiring either privatisation or state control.

Ostrom identified eight design principles characteristic of enduring commons institutions:

1. Clearly defined boundaries
2. Rules tailored to local conditions
3. Participatory decision-making by those affected
4. Monitoring by accountable community members
5. Graduated sanctions for rule violations
6. Accessible conflict-resolution mechanisms
7. Recognition of rights to organise by external authorities
8. Nested governance structures for larger commons

Application to Digital Commons:

Ostrom’s framework has become foundational for theorising and building democratic digital alternatives to platform capitalism. Her work has been extended to knowledge commons (digital libraries, open access scholarly publishing, scientific data), data commons (collective data governance models), open source software (Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, collaborative development communities), and digital infrastructure (internet governance, radio spectrum).

The key insight is that digital resources—whilst different from natural resources in being non-rivalrous (my use doesn’t diminish yours) and non-depletable—still require democratic governance structures to prevent “enclosure” by corporate interests and ensure equitable access. Organisations like the Mozilla Foundation, Ada Lovelace Institute, Guifi.net Foundation,⁴ and Ostrom’s own Workshop at Indiana University have adapted her principles for data commons governance, addressing questions of ownership, stewardship, access rights, and collective decision-making in digital contexts.

Critical Voices on BigTech and the Case for Democratic Technology

Surveillance Capitalism and Behavioural Control

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) defines surveillance capitalism as an unprecedented form of capitalism that unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data, which is then transformed into prediction products sold in behavioural futures markets.⁵ Companies like Google and Facebook harvest our digital trails to predict and increasingly manipulate our behaviour, creating what Zuboff terms “instrumentarian power”—the capacity to shape human action at scale through digital infrastructure.

Far from being neutral technology platforms, these corporations have built a totalitarian architecture of behaviour modification that threatens human autonomy and democratic society as fundamentally as industrial capitalism threatened the natural environment. Zuboff demonstrates how surveillance capitalism has escaped democratic oversight whilst accumulating extreme concentrations of knowledge and power that undermine the very possibility of a “right to the future tense”—our capacity to imagine, intend, and construct our own futures free from algorithmic manipulation.

Race, Technology, and Algorithmic Oppression

Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology (2019) introduces the concept of the “New Jim Code” to expose how discriminatory designs encode inequity in technological systems that claim neutrality and objectivity whilst actually reinforcing white supremacy and deepening social inequality.⁶ She demonstrates that automation has the capacity to hide, accelerate, and intensify discrimination by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or paradoxically attempting to fix racial bias whilst ultimately doing the opposite.

Through concrete examples ranging from beauty contest algorithms that overwhelmingly select white winners to predictive policing software that targets Black communities, Benjamin reveals how AI and automated systems systematically exclude marginalised communities. Most provocatively, she argues for understanding race itself as a technology—a tool deliberately engineered throughout history to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. Benjamin concludes with “abolitionist tools” for the New Jim Code, calling for emancipatory technological practices that fundamentally challenge racist social structures.

The Material Costs of AI

Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI (2021) dismantles the myth of artificial intelligence as immaterial, objective, and inevitable by exposing AI as fundamentally a technology of extraction.⁷ From the minerals mined from the earth and energy consumed, to the labour exploited in Amazon warehouses and data centres, to the data harvested from every human action and expression without consent, Crawford traces how this “planetary network” concentrates power, fuels undemocratic governance, and deepens environmental degradation and social inequality.

Crawford demonstrates that AI is neither “artificial” (requiring vast human labour, natural resources, and infrastructure) nor genuinely “intelligent” (lacking human capacities for generalisation, common sense, or causal reasoning), but rather a “registry of power” that embeds centuries-old systems of classification, discrimination, and control in new technological forms. She argues that challenging AI’s growing dominance requires moving beyond calls for “AI ethics” to fundamentally questioning the structures of power that AI reinforces.

Algorithmic Discrimination and Inequality

Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) exposes how mathematical models and algorithms that increasingly govern critical life decisions are neither neutral nor fair but actively reinforce discrimination and widen inequality.⁸ She identifies “weapons of math destruction” (WMDs) as algorithms sharing three key characteristics: opacity (inscrutable to those affected), scale (applied to vast populations), and damage (causing significant harm, particularly to the poor and marginalised).

O’Neil demonstrates through vivid case studies how these models create pernicious feedback loops—for instance, predictive policing algorithms that concentrate enforcement in poor neighbourhoods, leading to more arrests there, which the algorithm then interprets as validation for even more intensive policing. The models’ veneer of mathematical objectivity masks the reality that they encode the biases of their creators and the historical data they’re trained on.

Digital Poorhouses and Automated Inequality

Virginia Eubanks’s Automating Inequality (2018) systematically investigates how automated decision-making systems used in public services constitute a “digital poorhouse” that profiles, polices, and punishes poor and working-class people, particularly people of colour.⁹ Through three devastating case studies, she documents how automation in Indiana’s welfare system literally killed people by cutting benefits as they lay dying, how Los Angeles’s coordinated entry system for homeless services uses algorithms to score neediness whilst sharing data with police, and how Allegheny County’s predictive risk model for child abuse systematically overrepresents Black families.

Eubanks argues that automated systems serve as “empathy overrides,” allowing society to avoid confronting the moral and political challenges of poverty and racism by outsourcing hard decisions to machines. She calls for centring the experiences of those harmed, building cross-class movements led by the poor themselves, and fundamentally redesigning systems from a belief in universal human rights.

Digital Labour and the Cybertariat

Ursula Huws’s Labor in the Global Digital Economy (2014) provides a Marxist-feminist analysis of how information and communications technology has fundamentally restructured global capitalism, creating what she terms the “cybertariat.”¹⁰ She demonstrates that far from liberating workers, digital technologies have enabled capital to extend control through the “homework economy,” where work becomes feminised in the sense of being made “extremely vulnerable, able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force,” with boundaries between work and life dissolving under constant technological change.

Feminist Technoscience and the Cyborg

Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) uses the cyborg—a hybrid of organism and machine—as a transgressive figure to challenge essentialist identity politics and rigid boundary distinctions.¹¹ She argues that the cyborg represents possibilities for reimagining political solidarity through affinity and coalition rather than through claims to unified identity. Haraway calls for feminists to embrace rather than fear technology, advocating for a politics rooted in transgressing boundaries whilst taking responsibility for their construction.

Three Interpretations of Democratic Technology

The concept of “democratic tech” encompasses several overlapping but distinct approaches:

1. Democratisation of Access to Technology

This interpretation focuses on making technology more accessible rather than changing its governance. The broader concept of “democratisation of technology” refers to the process by which access to technology rapidly extends to an ever-broader audience, from a select group to the average public.

Examples:

• The Internet democratised access to knowledge, as did the invention of the printing press before it
• DIY electronics with Arduino lowered the threshold to participate in high-tech innovation
• Open-source software movements made professional-grade tools available to all

This trend is linked to the spread of knowledge and ability to perform high-tech tasks, challenging previous conceptions of expertise. Since the 1980s, a spreading constructivist conception of technology has emphasised that the social and technical domains are critically intertwined.

Critical Perspective: Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, argues that “the promotion of Internet-enabled amateurism is a lazy substitute for real equality of opportunity,” suggesting that mere access is insufficient for genuine democratisation.¹²

2. Democratic Governance of Technology

This approach, initiated by Mumford and championed by Feenberg, emphasises that technologies are neither neutral nor deterministic, but are encoded with specific socio-economic values and interests. This perspective insists that democratising technology requires more than access—it demands genuine participation in technological design and control.

The question is not simply who can use technology, but fundamentally who controls it and who decides how it develops.

3. E-Democracy and Civic Technology

A third interpretation defines “democratic tech” as tools that bring governments and citizens into the 21st century, empowering engagement in real time on daily issues between people and politicians in a seamless and transparent way.

This interpretation focuses on technology’s role in enhancing democratic participation and government transparency, though it often leaves questions of ownership and control unaddressed.

Practices of Democratic Governance Over Technology

Mumford defined democratic tech in terms of communal self-government, free communication amongst equals, and unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge. With the mainstreaming of the internet, different practices of communal governance and production emerged:

Commons-Based Peer Production: Yochai Benkler observed online collaboration of peer producers as a form of “commons-based peer production.”¹³ Michel Bauwens posed peer production as a third mode of production and peer governance as a third mode of governance, beyond the state and beyond the market.¹⁴

Commoning: Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, in their 2019 book Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, insist on the practice of commoning, discussing “peer governance through commoning.”¹⁵

Cooperative Governance: The cooperative governance tradition from the Social and Solidarity Economy, dating back to the 19th century, has demonstrated its importance in society. In cooperative governance, each member has one vote (see the International Cooperative Alliance), providing a practice of egalitarian governance in juxtaposition to the shareholder governance model in most companies.

Platform Cooperativism: Marrying the cultures of commons-based peer production with the cooperativist tradition brought us “open cooperativism” and “platform cooperativism.”

The Platform Cooperative Movement

Trebor Scholz coined the term “platform cooperativism” in a 2014 article titled “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy.”¹⁶ He criticised popular so-called “sharing economy” platforms and called for the creation of democratically controlled cooperative alternatives that “allow workers to exchange their labour without the manipulation of the middleman.”

By 2016, Scholz, Nathan Schneider,¹⁷ and others had established the Platform Cooperativism Consortium¹⁸ on the occasion of the “Building the Cooperative Internet” conference, creating an institutional home for this emerging movement.

A platform cooperative is “a cooperatively owned, democratically governed business that establishes a two-sided market via a computing platform, website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services.” Platform cooperatives are an alternative to venture capital-funded platforms insofar as they are owned and governed by those who depend on them most—workers, users, and other relevant stakeholders.

Besides platform cooperatives, there is also the movement of “steward-owned” businesses, where the legal form of a limited company is used and transformed into a more participatory governance model where different stakeholders are represented in the governance structures.

Contemporary Applications and Movements

Various groups and movements are currently using and advancing democratic technology:

Academic and Philosophical Communities: Philosophy of technology scholars, particularly those influenced by Critical Theory of Technology and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Platform Cooperative Movement: Organisations like the Platform Cooperativism Consortium help “start, grow, or convert to platform co-ops” based on principles including democratic governance, in which all stakeholders who own the platform collectively govern it.

Policy and Think Tank Networks: The Democratic Tech Alliance,¹⁹ founded by people like Robin Berjon and Sophie Bloemen with support from a broad alliance of political parties in the European Parliament, bolsters institutional capacity to see digital infrastructures governed by their stakeholders, to break authoritarian control over tech, and to build infrastructure designed for democracy.

Civic Technology Practitioners: Groups developing tools for citizen engagement and government transparency.

Democratic Technology in Practice: Two Case Studies

Social.coop: Cooperative Social Media with Sociocratic Governance

Social.coop represents a pioneering example of cooperative ownership applied to social media infrastructure.²⁰ Founded in 2017 by Nathan Schneider, Matthew Cropp, and Mayel de Borniol in the wake of the #BuyTwitter campaign, Social.coop is a cooperatively run instance of Mastodon—a decentralised social network based on open protocols and free software operating within the Fediverse.

Growing from 300+ founding members in 2017 to around 500 active users monthly by 2024, Social.coop operates on principles of cooperative ownership and sociocratic governance. Members contribute through sliding-scale subscription payments (£1-£10 per month) and volunteer labour in working groups (called circles in sociocratic terminology). The cooperative uses Loomio—itself a worker-owned cooperative’s platform—for democratic decision-making, and Open Collective for transparent financial management.²¹

What distinguishes Social.coop is its commitment to genuine democratic governance of digital infrastructure. Members collectively shape community policies, steward their own data, and manage shared technologies. The cooperative explicitly positions itself as part of “cooperative clouds”—organisations combining open-source cloud software with human-scaled cooperative business models—offering a concrete alternative to surveillance capitalism’s “free” model whilst demonstrating how users can maintain control over their social data and interactions through trusted cooperative structures.²²

Social.coop’s values—honesty, openness, social responsibility, and caring for others—are embedded in its Code of Conduct and operational practices. The cooperative adheres to the International Cooperative Alliance’s principles whilst experimenting with new forms of technopolitical governance appropriate for federated digital platforms.

Decidim: Civic Tech with Democratic Governance

Decidim exemplifies both civic technology and democratically governed technological infrastructure.²³ Developed at Barcelona’s Laboratory for Democratic Innovation and now used by hundreds of organisations worldwide—from cities like Helsinki and Barcelona to regional governments, national states, NGOs, and cooperatives—Decidim is a public-commons, free and open digital infrastructure for participatory democracy.

What makes Decidim particularly significant for democratic technology is not merely its function as civic tech (enabling participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, collaborative legislation, and other democratic processes) but its own democratic governance. The platform is governed by the Decidim Free Software Association, and more broadly by MetaDecidim—the open community that collaborates in designing the platform and developing the project. Remarkably, Decidim uses itself for its own governance, embodying the principle that democratic technology should be democratically governed.

The Social Contract:

Central to Decidim’s democratic character is its Social Contract,²⁴ which all members of the Decidim community must endorse and follow. This contract establishes binding commitments around:

• Free software and open content: All code must be Free Open Source Software (AGPL v3 or compatible), with open and interoperable standards
• Transparency and traceability: All data related to participatory processes must be available for download and analysis in open formats
• Privacy and data confidentiality: Personal data shall never be transferred to third parties; political preferences remain inaccessible even to administrators
• Democratic quality: Commitment to quality indicators, equal access, and avoiding “participatory washing”
• Accountability: Responding to queries and following up on participatory process results
• Collaborative governance: Democratic self-organisation and control by the community

This Social Contract represents a sophisticated attempt to encode democratic values directly into the governance of technological infrastructure. It demonstrates how communities can establish shared commitments to care for the collective based on explicitly articulated values—moving beyond mere technical features to create binding social relationships around democratic technology.

Decidim thus operates across three dimensions: the political (what kind of democracy it enables), the technopolitical (how it is itself democratically designed and governed), and the technical (the conditions of its production and operation). In a context dominated by corporate platforms and “algorithmic governance,” Decidim stands as a commons-based alternative: publicly supported, democratically designed, and recursively using itself for its own participatory governance.

Our Position: Democratic Tech as Commons and Cooperation

We take the position of the commons, understanding “democracy” as “for and by the people.” Consequently, for “democratic tech” we follow the intellectual lineage of Mumford-Feenberg-Ostrom-Scholz and many other scholars who view democratic technology as fundamentally about who controls technology rather than just who can access it. We could summarise “democratic tech” as the intersection between in particular three movements: the free/libre open source movement, the cooperative social and solidarity economy and the long time human tradition of commoning.

More concretely, and in relation to resistance to tech monopolies, we view democratic tech as having these key elements:

1. Community ownership and/or control
2. Opposition to surveillance capitalism
3. Commons-based development
4. Cooperative governance structures
5. Transitioning towards collective digital autonomy

Following Lewis Mumford’s definition, we can depict democratic technology as having five core elements that constitute a commons:

• Communal self-government
• Free communication amongst equals
• Unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge
• Protection against arbitrary external controls
• Individual moral responsibility for behaviour affecting the whole community

Our approach explicitly positions itself against BigTech’s extractive models, making it part of the broader movement towards technological sovereignty, digital autonomy, and digital commons.

Concrete Examples of Our Work

The Five Pillar Framework

The Free Knowledge Institute has developed a sustainability framework that is community-centred, inspired by many existing democratic tech initiatives. The Five Pillar Model²⁵ provides a commons-based business model framework with five pillars almost identical to Mumford’s definition:

1. Shared Knowledge
2. Co-governance
3. Co-production using Open Source Technologies
4. Non-extractive Revenue Strategies
5. Community-Driven Shared Mission

Barcelona’s Procomuns Conference

In Barcelona, the FKI signed a Memorandum with the City of Barcelona to establish a working group on Commons Collaborative Economy (called Barcola), together with research group Dimmons, Guifi.net and others. Under the leadership of Mayo Fuster Morell and BarCola we co-organised the Procomuns Conference in 2016, where commons-based peer production and especially platform cooperativism have been the central pillars. This was a starting point for the FKI to organise La Comunificadora, a commons collaborative economy “start-up” programme for the City of Barcelona, to initiate the femProcomuns cooperative and CommonsCloud.coop - a cooperative cloud service to user members, produced by worker and collaborator members.

Roadmap to Sovereign Tech (Netherlands)

Commons Network has developed a Roadmap to Sovereign Tech anchored in digital commons.²⁶ This roadmap was commissioned by the Ministry for Digital Affairs in the Netherlands, following a year-long series of workshops with stakeholders from the digital commons sector, public institutions, and representatives from various ministries. The three key action lines are:

1. Investing in public digital infrastructure
2. Facilitating sustainable and democratic business and organisational models
3. Increasing public awareness and digital skills

Roadmap for Democratic Tech (Amsterdam)

Commons Network and Waag Futurelab have developed a “Roadmap for Democratic Tech for the community economy and broader social economy in the city,” commissioned by the City of Amsterdam.²⁷

Why This Matters Now

In the current context of platform worker exploitation, algorithmic discrimination, massive disinformation campaigns and manipulation of public opinion (including what were supposed to be democratic elections), not to speak of extreme wealth inequalities—all directly attributed to dominant BigTech corporations—putting the focus on commons-based, democratic tech as our key shared mission seems not just appropriate but urgent.

The term’s evolution shows how different communities have adapted the concept to their specific concerns, from philosophical critiques of technological determinism to practical models for worker-owned platforms to geopolitical strategies for democratic nations. Yet at its core remains a simple question: will technology serve democratic values and human flourishing, or will it concentrate power and extract value for the few?

Join the Movement

We invite you to join us in this networked, shared mission to help build democratic tech and, with it, a substantial community of people committed to technological democracy and to collective digital autonomy.

In our next articles, we will explore concrete examples of democratic technology and examine how communities, institutions, and movements can collaborate to make these alternatives widespread and effective.

References

Above image is titled “The Future is Open” by Preeti Singh for Creative Commons. The piece is part of The Greats, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Building Counter-Power Against Techno-Authoritarianism

This is the third in a series examining BigTech’s threats to democratic society and exploring pathways forward; [1], [2].

As explored in our previous articles, democratic foundations face unprecedented threats from BigTech’s construction of techno-authoritarian infrastructure. The concentration of digital power in the hands of a few corporations undermines democratic institutions, accelerates climate breakdown, and systematically excludes marginalised communities. Yet this trajectory is not inevitable. Alternative pathways exist—pathways that prioritise human agency, democratic participation, and sustainable development.

Moving from awareness to action requires understanding both the preconditions necessary for digital sovereignty and the concrete steps needed to build counter-power against extractive digital capitalism.

The Foundation: Essential Preconditions

Open Source as a Starting Point

Free and open source software represents a fundamental precondition for transparent digital processes. By enabling community-powered collaboration, avoiding vendor lock-in, and enhancing system security, open source provides the foundation for democratic technology. However, the past two decades have demonstrated that open source alone is insufficient.

Major corporations, including Microsoft, Google, and Meta, have successfully exploited open source benefits whilst maintaining oligopolistic control over users. Microsoft transformed from calling Linux “a cancer” to becoming a major publisher of open source software. Google built its surveillance-advertising empire on modified Linux systems. Meta leverages open source extensively whilst operating closed, extractive platforms.

The lesson is clear: whilst open source remains essential, it must be combined with other elements to achieve meaningful digital sovereignty.

Open Standards and Protocols

Open standards for document formats and interoperability protocols have featured prominently in policy discussions across Europe and beyond. Yet implementation has revealed significant challenges. Lobby pressure has corrupted even international standards organisations, allowing corporations to have proprietary formats officially recognised as “open standards.”

More troubling is the “Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish” strategy, originally developed by Microsoft and now widely adopted. Google exemplified this approach with its Messaging service: initially embracing open standards to gain interoperability, then extending their implementation with proprietary features, and finally extinguishing compatibility to lock users into their ecosystem.

Open standards remain necessary but require vigilant protection and enforcement to prevent corporate capture.

Decentralised Architecture

Software architecture fundamentally shapes power distribution. Centralised services like Google and Facebook, despite using open source technologies, face no obligation to share their modifications due to their closed, centralised nature. Each platform operates as a walled garden: Instagram, YouTube, and X all provide messaging functionality, yet none interoperate, each locking users into separate data silos.

Decentralisation was the guiding principle of the early internet, designed to avoid single points of failure and communication breakdown. Email remains one of the internet’s most successful applications precisely because it maintains decentralised architecture. Anyone can establish an email server using open protocols and exchange messages across the entire network.

Decentralised networks distribute power, eliminate single points of failure, enhance security and resilience, and provide greater freedom for participation and innovation.

Beyond Technical Solutions: Systemic Change

Regenerative Business Models

Technical solutions alone cannot address the systemic issues created by surveillance capitalism. Google pioneered behavioural profiling to sell predicted consumer behaviour to advertisers, becoming the world’s largest advertising platform. Meta followed with intensive data mining to capture the second-largest advertising market. Amazon evolved into a marketplace that increasingly controls commodity production and pricing whilst extracting substantial fees from sellers.

These extractive practices appropriate behavioural data from legitimate owners, abuse platform power, and profit from influencing people against their interests. Rather than merely regulating these practices, we must develop alternative business models that regenerate commons and build collective capacity.

Platform cooperatives, cooperative clouds, and data commons represent emerging models that place ownership and governance with users and producers rather than extractive corporations. The Free Knowledge Institute’s Five Pillar Framework provides a methodology for analysing existing ventures and designing new ones based on community-centred missions, shared knowledge, co-production models, regenerative revenue strategies, and co-governance structures.

The Limits of Regulation

Democratic societies depend on shared rules and regulations. The European Union leads globally in protecting citizens and companies through comprehensive legislation addressing digital rights and platform accountability. This regulatory work, supported by networks of civil society organisations, politicians, and civil servants, remains essential for democratic defence.

However, regulation alone proves insufficient. Multimillion-euro fines imposed after years of investigation represent mere business costs for corporations whose power concentration continues unchecked. BigTech routinely violates existing regulations with impunity, treating sanctions as operational expenses rather than meaningful constraints.

Effective regulation requires both stronger enforcement and complementary strategies. Public procurement policies offer particular opportunities to encourage public digital infrastructure by setting conditions that favour smaller, locally-focused, democratically-organised alternatives.

Building Counter-Power

The most critical challenge involves building sufficient counter-power to make regulation effective. Currently, democracies remain almost completely locked into BigTech ecosystems, with citizens, businesses, institutions, and governments dependent on platforms controlled by a handful of tech moguls and their autocratic political allies.

Democratic technology represents the antithesis of techno-authoritarianism. Rather than serving corporate interests, democratic tech truly serves its intended users. Rather than exploiting users for profit, it enables meaningful participation in its development and governance. Rather than operating as black boxes, it maintains transparency and accountability.

Public digital infrastructure¹ embodies this vision: democratic digital environments where citizens collaborate closely with public institutions and communities co-govern the technologies they use. This infrastructure operates according to public interest rather than private profit, ensuring that technological development serves collective wellbeing rather than extractive accumulation.

The Path Forward

Building digital sovereignty requires coordinated action across multiple fronts. Open source software, open standards, and decentralised architecture provide necessary technical foundations. Regenerative business models and platform cooperatives offer economic alternatives to surveillance capitalism. Strong regulation and public procurement policies create supportive institutional frameworks.

Yet the decisive factor remains building sufficient counter-power through democratic technology that serves people rather than corporations. This means creating alternatives that people actually want to use—platforms that provide genuine value whilst respecting privacy, autonomy, and democratic participation.

The urgency cannot be overstated. As techno-authoritarian infrastructure consolidates, the window for effective resistance narrows. However, the foundations for alternatives already exist through decades of commons-based collaboration, open source tech and cooperative development, and democratic innovation.

The question is not whether alternatives are possible—it is whether we will mobilise sufficient resources and coordination to build them at the scale and speed necessary to counter BigTech’s assault on democracy.

In our next articles, we will explore concrete examples of democratic technology and examine how communities, institutions, and movements can collaborate to make these alternatives widespread and effective.

The Free Knowledge Institute works to accelerate the growth of digital commons, cooperative clouds, community networks, platform cooperatives, data commons, community AI, and civic technology. Learn more at freeknowledge.eu

References

¹ Towards Public Digital Infrastructure, NESTA Report (2022): https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/TowardsPublicDigitalInfrastructure_v0.2.pdf

How BigTech Dismantles Democratic Foundations

Why the techno-authoritarian threat demands urgent action

This is the second in a series of articles examining BigTech’s threats to democratic society and exploring pathways forward. In our first article, we exposed the ten pillars of techno-authoritarianism that BigTech is constructing. But why is this really so threatening? Many people still prefer to think “this is just how things are”—to be patient and carry on. But is the threat truly so serious? Are we sleepwalking into some kind of a techno-authoritarian society? Can we call this really a Digital Coup¹, or a Tech Coup²? As we will see, the answer is unequivocally yes. BigTech’s assault on democracy isn’t merely disruptive; it systematically dismantles the foundational principles that make democratic society possible. Let’s examine how these technological giants undermine the core pillars of democratic governance. #Equality Before the Law: Rendered Obsolete Democratic society rests on the principle that all citizens are equal before the law. BigTech has shattered this foundation through multiple mechanisms. Algorithmic discrimination ensures marginalised groups cannot function as equals in society. Predictive policing systems target innocent people based on probabilities, stripping away the fundamental right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. These systems create self-fulfilling prophecies, generating automatic targets for detention whilst offering no protection against discrimination. Meanwhile, the richest corporations stand above the law. They systematically avoid taxes, ignore European legislation, and treat regulatory fines as mere business costs. Apple’s App Store monopolistic behaviour, Microsoft and Google’s GDPR violations in schools, Meta’s exploitation of children’s data, and forced consent mechanisms all demonstrate how BigTech operates beyond legal accountability. As privacy advocate Max Schrems and NOYB.eu have documented, these companies simply refuse compliance whilst regulators struggle to enforce democratic oversight.

The Colonisation of Essential Services

Perhaps most insidiously, BigTech has infiltrated every sector that human beings depend upon: housing, mobility, agriculture, commerce, healthcare, education, media, transport, policing, and military services. This comprehensive disruption, combined with market fundamentalism that claims “the market will solve it more efficiently,” has resulted in public regulations being rendered ineffective or entirely substituted by the de facto operating procedures of tech platforms. Consider the gig economy’s assault on workers’ rights. Companies like Uber follow a well-tested playbook for market disruption: move fast, break things, then claim it’s too late to change. They launch platforms in new sectors, rapidly build user bases before regulators and civil society can respond, then present their dominance as inevitable. Nick Srnicek’s concept of platform capitalism reveals how this ‘fait accompli’ strategy systematically undermines democratic oversight. Platform workers lose basic employment protections, becoming atomised contractors subject to algorithmic management without recourse.

The Destruction of Democratic Discourse

Democracy requires informed public debate based on shared facts and evidence. BigTech has systematically demolished this foundation through several interconnected mechanisms. Misinformation and disinformation proliferate when profit motives reward polarisation over truth. This demolishes our media landscape—the “fourth estate” essential to democratic accountability. When algorithms amplify the most divisive content to maximise engagement, reasonable public discourse becomes impossible. Simultaneously, scientific and evidence-based policymaking comes under sustained attack. Climate change denial flourishes on platforms that prioritise engagement over accuracy, making collective action on existential threats nearly impossible.

The AI Race: Abandoning Public Values

The artificial intelligence arms race exemplifies BigTech’s contempt for democratic values. This technological development proceeds without public input, democratic oversight, or consideration of collective wellbeing. The ecological damage is enormous. High energy and water consumption for AI systems adds to global scarcity, with the most damaging effects falling on the world’s poor. Yet tech leaders like Eric Schmidt dismiss climate goals entirely, arguing that AI development must proceed regardless of environmental consequences. This represents a fundamental rejection of collective cooperation to overcome global threats. Instead of working together to address human-caused climate change and mass biodiversity loss, BigTech promotes a propagandised narrative of inevitable collapse that serves only to justify their technological determinism.

The Authoritarian Alliance

The alliance between BigTech and authoritarian movements represents the gravest threat to democratic governance. Leaders like Trump pursue political agendas designed to demolish democratic safeguards in the US, seeking to provoke chaos and reshape geopolitical power structures. Tech moguls like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have embraced explicit far-right positions, offering support to ultra-nationalist movements worldwide. For them, democratic regulations represent “red tape” obstructing their path to greater wealth and political power. This alliance actively works to reverse hard-won social progress. Diversity, feminism, and LGBTQI+ movements are branded as undesirable, whilst a return to patriarchal culture is actively cultivated. Rights conquered after decades of social mobilisation face systematic cancellation.

The Ultimate Horror: Algorithmic Killing

The most dystopian development combines BigTech’s surveillance infrastructure with military violence. The “algorithmic killing pipeline” merges Amazon and Google’s surveillance technology and data centre capacity with probability-based target prediction systems that operate with minimal human oversight and consequently high error rates. When private technology corporations can determine who lives and dies through automated systems, we have crossed into territory that renders democratic governance impossible.

The Moment of Choice

The convergence of these trends represents an inflection point for human civilisation. We face a choice between two futures: one where technological power serves democratic values and human flourishing, or one where democracy itself becomes a quaint historical curiosity in the age of techno-authoritarianism. The construction of this alternative future is not inevitable, but it requires recognising the full scope of the threat we face. BigTech’s assault on democracy is systematic, comprehensive, and accelerating. Only by understanding its mechanisms can we begin to construct the alternatives that our democratic future demands. In our next article, we’ll explore the pathways forward—the concrete steps we can take to reclaim democratic control over technology and build systems that serve human flourishing rather than corporate power.

References: ¹ Carole Cadwalladr, who revealed the Cambridge Analytica scandal, talks about a “Digital Coup”; see here most recent TED talk (April 2025). “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8AbkNE

² Marietje Schaake (2025). Princeton University Press. “The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley.”

• February 2024 - Participant, WSF2024, World Social Forum, Kathmandu:  report in Grassroots Economic Organising 
• 2020-2023 - Operational member (with Wouter Tebbens), meet.coop, The online meeting co-op: Change the world, one meeting at a time. Convenor, community circle.
• 2018-2020 - Co-convenor (with Mary Kaldor) of a discussion circle at LSE, London, on the work of deceased radical economist, Robin Murray; Chief Economist, Greater London Council 1982-86, pioneer of Fairtrade and ‘wealth from waste’; author Cooperation in the age of Google 2010, Danger and opportunity - Crisis and the new social economy 2009.
• 2018 - (with Lu Gao), Lives in STS as ‘a series of failed political experiments, Society for Social Studies of Science conference Sydney, Australia.
• 2016-18 - Contributor, radical science archive (BSSRS archive), Wellcome Foundation, London.
• 2018 - Location - Explorations of power and landscapes of design, Barefoot Documents, Brighton. Collected 1990s’ papers. Researchgate
• 2016 - Re-issued Living thinkwork - Where do labour processes come from?, digital edition, Barefoot Documents, Brighton.
• 2009 - (with Joe Tidd), ‘The practice of routines and representations in design and development.’, Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 18, Number 4, pp. 551–574 doi:10.1093/icc/dtp019.
• 2003-2006 - Researcher, SPRU, University of Sussex. ‘Knowledge management’ through visual materials, in practices of design. Ethnographic field study of engineers doing conceptual design of a silicon-fab ion-implantation machine.
• 2001-2003 - Senior research fellow, AEGIS, University of Western Sydney, Business School.
• 2001 - Birds were dinosaurs once - The diversity and evolution of Research and Technology Organisations, synthesis report of the RISE project , TSER programme, European Commission, DG Research. Researchgate
• 1994 - ‘Where are designers? Styles of design practice, objects of design and views of users in Computer Supported Cooperative Work’, in Rosenberg & Hutchison (eds), Design issues in CSCW, Springer-Verlag, 1994, pp. 151-177. Researchgate
• 1994 - ‘How powerful could CSCW be? Traditions for understanding and challenging professional practices’, Oksnöen symposium on participatory design, Norway. Researchgate
• 1993-94 - Organisational change consultancy (rollout of supply chain digital infrastructure), Ericsson Telecom, Stockholm.
• 1990-2001 - Senior research fellow, Centre for Research in Innovation Management, University of Brighton, Business School.
• 1993 - ‘The location of humans, ordinary people and women in system design - ‘At the centre’?’, in Location 2018, above. Originally: ‘Human-centred systems, gender and computer supported co-operative work’ in Probert & Wilson (eds) (1993), Pink collar blues – Work, gender and technology, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 101-125.
• 1987-1990 - Freelance, Barefoot Documents consultancy. Technology and labour, prospectus.
• 1986-1990 - London Strategic Policy Unit, policy researcher. Gender and IT, participatory design of workplace IT systems.
• 1982-86 - Greater London Council, technologist/economist, Industry and Employment Branch (‘The London Industrial Strategy’). The emerging knowledge economy, technology networks, digital convergence and recomposition of labour, telecoms privatisation.
• 1982 - Science or society? The politics of the work of scientists, Channel 4 TV, Crucible, Pan Books.
• 1980 - Living thinkwork - Where do labour processes come from? Conference of Socialist Economists Books. Re-issued, see 2016 above.
• 1978 - Operational research and the forces of production - A Marxist analysis of science and ideology, DPhil thesis, University of Sussex.
• 1977-78 - Chemco News, ICI shop stewards’ Combine Committee newspaper, editor.
• 1974-77 - Operational research analyst/trade union organiser, ICI Organics Division, Blackley, Manchester.
• 1972- 82 - Radical Science Journal editorial collective, founder member.
• 1972 - Co-organiser, conference on workers’ self-management in science, BSSRS, London.
• 1969-74 - Postgraduate (MSc, DPhil), history and social studies of science, University of Sussex.
• 1967-69 - Chemical engineer, ICI Plastics Division.
• 1964-67 - BSc, chemical engineering, UMIST, Manchester.

Are we witnessing the end of democracy and free society?

This is the first in a series of articles examining BigTech’s threats to democratic society and exploring pathways forward.

We’re living through multiple converging crises globally, yet rather than helping to address these challenges, BigTech is accelerating societal collapse. These giant technology corporations are constructing techno-authoritarian infrastructures that undermine democracy, accelerate climate breakdown, and systematically exclude marginalised communities. Journalist Carole Cadwalladr aptly calls this phenomenon the “Digital Coup.”

This is a serious accusation that demands examination. At stake are the core public values that underpin democratic society. Let’s examine how BigTech threatens our democratic foundations.

The Ten Pillars of Techno-Authoritarianism

1. Extreme Wealth Concentration Tech billionaires now command combined wealth exceeding €1.7 trillion, whilst systematically avoiding tax payments. This unprecedented concentration of economic power fundamentally undermines democratic equality and creates a new class of digital oligarchs.¹

2. Economic Extraction 80% of total spending on cloud software and services for business use in Europe goes to US companies, representing a volume of €265 billion annually. It is estimated that this sustains some 2 million jobs in the US. This extraction clearly fuels the extreme wealth concentration.²

3. Surveillance Capitalism and Mass Manipulation Through sophisticated profiling systems, BigTech monitors and influences what we see, read, buy, and vote for. The Cambridge Analytica scandal during Trump’s first presidency and Brexit campaigns exposed these practices, but rather than being curtailed, manipulation techniques have been perfected, particularly by Meta and X. It is the services from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft that virtually everyone uses, often free of charge, while its the advertisers that pay.³

4. Patriarchal Alliances with Extreme Right Tech moguls like Elon Musk have formed explicit alliances with authoritarian movements, using their platforms to amplify extremist messaging and undermine democratic institutions. The leaders of Google, Amazon, Facebook, X, OpenAI and Palantir allied with Trump in his second mandate, rolling out their playbook to increase their power, breaking down the protection of human rights and democratic institutions one by one.⁴

5. Misinformation and the Erosion of Truth Under the guise of “free speech,” platforms have abandoned content moderation, creating vast pools of misinformation where evidence-based policy-making becomes impossible. When Musk forces all users to see his tweets regardless of following status, whilst simultaneously attacking democracies in the UK and Brazil and supporting parties like Germany’s AfD, we witness the transformation of communication infrastructure into propaganda machinery.⁵

6. Climate Denial and Escapism BigTech leaders actively promote climate change denial, preventing effective cooperation on sustainability transitions. Tellingly, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk all invest in space ventures—not for humanity’s future, but as escape routes for the ultra-wealthy, complementing their private islands and post-collapse bunkers.⁶

7. AI Hype and Resource Consumption Artificial intelligence is being hyped whilst consuming enormous energy resources. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s scenario suggests AI could consume 99% of energy by 2030, even as drinking water shortages rise exponentially worldwide.⁷

8. Algorithmic Bias and Systematic Exclusion AI systems and BigTech platforms systematically exclude marginalised communities, standardising on white male participants and perpetuating existing inequalities through algorithmic design.⁸

9. Predictive Policing Systems Combining large sets of surveillance data and other sources of personal information, these systems calculate the probability of people committing future crimes with the aim of preventing them. These systems often create a self-fulfilling prophecy, where surveillance leads to a higher perceived criminality. People of colour and marginalised communities often suffer most, whilst limiting civil liberties.⁹

10. Centralised and algorithmic military Google and Amazon contract with the IDF to contribute their datacentre and surveillance data, whilst other companies automate the surveillance-assination pipelines. In June 2025, four senior executives from Meta, Palantir, and OpenAI were directly commissioned as lieutenant colonels in the US—literal capture of military command structure by BigTech interests. These developments bring the dystopian scenarios of science fiction disturbingly close to reality. At the same time these centralised systems are more fragile for cyberattacks, and Europe suffers from weapon systems that are partially under control by the US. ¹⁰

Beyond Despair

The combination of these threats creates a profound sense of despair, with people losing hope for a better future. Without hope, many people feel paralysed whilst trying to hold on to their last privileges before the propagandised collapse. However, this trajectory is not inevitable. Alternative pathways exist—pathways that prioritise human agency, democratic participation, and sustainable development.

The construction of techno-authoritarian infrastructure is not unstoppable. But before exploring concrete solutions and pathways forward, it is essential to recognise its mechanisms and impacts as a first step toward building something better.

References:

¹ Oxfam (2025). “Billionaire wealth surges by $2 trillion in 2024.” Forbes (2025). “The 2025 Billionaires List.”

² The Asterès economic research firm studied the economic impact of French & European companies’ purchases of US cloud software and services. https://www.cigref.fr/technological-dependence-on-american-software-and-cloud-services-an-assessment-of-the-economic-consequences-in-europe

³ Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Amnesty International (2019). “Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of the iceberg.”

⁴ German Chancellor Scholz (2025): “Musk’s support for European far-right is ‘completely unacceptable’.” AP News. France24 (2025). “Elon Musk’s tweets: Raising the profile of Europe’s far right.”

⁵ Oxford University (2025). “Majority support moderation on social media platforms, global survey shows.” PNAS (2023). “Resolving content moderation dilemmas between free speech and harmful misinformation.”

⁶ Climate Action Against Disinformation (2024). “How Big Tech Enables Climate Disinformation in a World on the Brink”. Rushkoff, D. (2022). “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.”

⁷ Schmidt, E. (2024). “Former Google CEO urges AI acceleration, dismisses climate goals.” Computing. Inequality.org (2024). “AI’s Energy Demands Are Fueling the Climate Crisis.” The Register (2025). “Datacenter energy usage to more than double in next 5 years.” Washington Post (2024). “AI industry to Congress: ‘We need energy’ to fuel race with China.”

⁸ UN Human Rights (2024). “Racism and AI: ‘Bias from the past leads to bias in the future’.” Cambridge Judge Business School (2023). “The dark side of AI: algorithmic bias and global inequality.”

⁹ The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on “Street Level Surveillance” and “Predictive Policing”, https://sls.eff.org/technologies/predictive-policing

¹⁰ DefenseScoop (2025). “‘Growing demand’ sparks DOD to raise Palantir’s Maven contract to more than $1B.” The Intercept (2024). “Project Nimbus Contract Ties Google, Amazon to Israel Arms Firms.”

Above image is titled “Sharing Brightens The Future” by Bulgarian illustrator and graphic designer, Teo Georgiev. The piece is part of The Greats, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Biyanto Rebin, an open knowledge advocate and Indonesian Wikipedian:

“Sedikit demi sedikit, lama-lama menjadi bukit (meaning: many a mickle makes a muckle).”

The Free Knowledge Institute: Two Decades of Digital Commons Innovation

The Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) has worked within the digital commons movement for nearly two decades, focusing on open knowledge, collaborative technologies, and sustainable cooperative models. From its origins in the Netherlands to its work in Barcelona’s commons ecosystem, the organisation has explored how academic research can translate into practical tools for building more equitable digital futures.

Foundation and Early Years (2006-2011)

The FKI’s journey began in 2006 when its team coordinated the European Commission-funded SELF project, creating a platform of free knowledge educational resources about free and open source software. This initial project established the organisation’s focus on democratising access to knowledge and technology.

In 2007, the FKI was formally established as a foundation in Amsterdam, spinning off from the Internet Society Netherlands. This institutional foundation provided the platform for the organisation’s ambitious educational initiatives. The following year marked a significant milestone when FKI co-organised the international Free Knowledge Free Technology Conference in Barcelona, establishing early connections with the Catalan capital that would later become central to its work.

The organisation’s educational work became evident in 2008 when it secured European Commission funding to establish the Free Technology Academy (FTA). This initiative offered master-level courses on free software and open standards through a consortium of European open universities, operating under Europe’s Erasmus Programme. The FTA represented an approach to higher education that applied open knowledge principles to formal academic structures.

FKI’s collaborative approach continued to flourish through partnerships with various organisations. In 2009, it co-organised Xnet’s Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, further strengthening its ties with the Spanish open culture movement. Between 2009 and 2011, the organisation participated in the openSE project, working on open educational content frameworks that would influence later developments in commons-based education.

Growing Influence and Recognition (2010-2015)

The early 2010s saw FKI gaining recognition within the international commons community. The organisation participated in events including the Drumbeat festival in Barcelona, the fOSSA congress in Grenobles, and the International Commons Conference in Berlin in 2010. These participations connected FKI with the growing global conversation about commons-based alternatives to traditional economic models.

Following the conclusion of European Commission funding in 2011, the FTA consortium continued operations based on student fees, demonstrating the sustainability potential of commons-based educational models. This transition period proved crucial for FKI’s understanding of how commons initiatives could achieve long-term viability.

In 2013, FKI’s participation in the Economy of the Commons Conference in Berlin marked a deepening engagement with economic theory and practice around commons-based models. This involvement would later inform the organisation’s most significant contribution to the field: the development of the Five Pillar Framework.

The Barcelona Chapter and Innovation (2015-2018)

The period from 2015 to 2018 represents perhaps the most transformative phase in FKI’s history. The organisation’s participation in the Digital DIY research project, funded by the European Commission’s Human Digital Age programme, provided the foundation for developing practical tools that would have lasting impact on the commons movement.

In 2016, FKI published the first version of its Five Pillar Framework for cooperative commons sustainability models. This framework, developed as part of the Digital DIY research project, represented a contribution to understanding how commons-based organisations could achieve sustainability whilst maintaining their core values.

The same year brought several institutional developments that would define FKI’s Barcelona-based activities. The organisation became the legal umbrella for The Things Network Catalonia (TTNcat), a community Internet of Things network that embodied many of the principles FKI advocated. More significantly, FKI signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Barcelona City Council to establish “BarCola” – the Barcelona Commons Collaborative Economy Commission. This partnership brought together research institutions and grassroots community organisations to articulate alternatives to extractive collaborative economy models.

FKI’s practical application of its theoretical work became evident when Barcelona Activa selected the organisation to realise the first edition of La Comunificadora, a support programme for commons collaborative economy initiatives. Shaped around the Five Pillar model and supported by a diverse ecosystem of mentors, this programme accompanied a first cohort of projects through the transition to commons-based business models.

Cooperative Evolution and Legacy (2017-2025)

The year 2017 marked a significant transition in FKI’s organisational approach. The organisation convened a dozen organisations to initiate CommonsCloud, a cooperative cloud initiative that exemplified the practical application of commons principles to digital infrastructure. More importantly, FKI co-founded femProcomuns SCCL, a multistakeholder cooperative in Barcelona that would become the vehicle for continuing and expanding much of FKI’s work.

This transition reflected FKI’s commitment to practising what it preached. By transferring CommonsCloud, its transition programme work with La Comunificadora, and the community IoT network around The Things Network Catalonia to the cooperative, FKI demonstrated how organisations could evolve toward more participatory and sustainable models.

In 2018, FKI took a step back from direct project implementation, focusing instead on supporting femProcomuns in establishing its activities. This period of consolidation included international networking activities, such as participation in London’s OpenCoop Conference, which helped connect FKI’s experiences with broader international movements.

The organisation’s continued commitment to cooperative models became evident in 2020 with its role in co-founding The Online Meeting Cooperative (meet.coop), demonstrating how commons principles could be applied to digital collaboration tools that became essential during the global pandemic.

Current Revival and Future Ambitions

After a period of reduced activity, 2025 has seen FKI reactivate with renewed ambition. The organisation now aims to accelerate the growth of digital commons across multiple domains, including cooperative clouds, community networks, platform cooperatives, data commons, community AI, and civic technology. This revival reflects both the growing relevance of commons-based approaches and the accumulated experience FKI has gained through nearly two decades of practice.

The Five Pillar Framework, originally developed by FKI in 2016, continues to evolve and find new applications. Through its partnership with femProcomuns and ongoing refinement by practitioners, the framework has become a recognised methodology for developing sustainable, community-driven business models that prioritise shared value over extractive practices.

Impact and Recognition

FKI’s contributions have gained recognition in various media and academic contexts. The organisation’s work has been featured in publications such as La Vanguardia and academic publications including the 2019 Sharing Cities Action book, which published a chapter about the Five Pillar Sustainability Model of the Commons.

FKI’s work with Barcelona City Council helped establish frameworks for supporting commons-based alternatives to extractive collaborative economy models, whilst its educational initiatives trained practitioners and researchers across Europe in open knowledge and technology approaches.

The Free Knowledge Institute’s nearly two-decade journey illustrates how sustained commitment to commons principles can contribute to institutional change. From its early work in open education to its current focus on diverse digital commons initiatives, FKI has worked to demonstrate that alternatives to extractive digital capitalism are possible and practical. As the organisation enters its third decade, its experience and developed methodologies position it to contribute to scaling commons-based approaches to meet the challenges of an increasingly digital world.