Digital commons: More impact through shared effort and governance

Public digital services operated by agile internal teams have demonstrated how they can transform both the delivery ability and the efficiency of administrations. On the other side of the spectrum, govtech and civic tech show that the private sector can also serve that movement and improve citizen-facing services more than through merely executing on public call for tenders. Next to those, grassroots initiatives from NGOs or unstructured “bands in a garage” groups of individuals constantly remind us that innovation also comes from filling gaps that were seen by no explicitly mandated actor.

What if we could build on the strengths of all those types of stakeholders to build even better services for cheaper while opening more opportunities for everyone?

Digital Commons go beyond “building in the open” towards “building together”, explicitly sharing decision power with all contributors and maximizing reusability, paving the way to delivering the sort of services that only digital platforms usually enable, without the power concentration of big tech companies.

This lightning keynote will introduce the notion of Digital Commons, give some examples (Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, OpenFisca…) and highlight how their impact was made possible thanks to shared governance and effort across stakeholders. A complementary Breakout session will introduce tools to assess how “common” the governance of a digital asset is.