#digitalcommons — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #digitalcommons, aggregated by home.social.
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> @nlnet announces 60 projects strenghtening the #DigitalCommons ¹
➡️ There are two #Fediverse-related tools:
#ActivityBot — A full #ActivityPub server in a single #PHP file
👉 https://nlnet.nl/project/ActivityBot#Fedipub — #Ruby Library for adding #ActivityPub Federation
👉 https://nlnet.nl/project/Fedipub¹ https://nlnet.nl/news/2026/20260808-60-new-projects.html
toot: https://social.nlnet.nl/@nlnet/statuses/01M07GJWG4KD5CC8BQ8ZNX90T7 -
Radical opensource means credible exit.
What does it look like?
Like the upcoming release of https://xrforge.isvery.ninja :1. visit a URL
2. scroll to bottom
3. download all data
4. download all data incl. platform
5. profit!Anyone can run/modify the code and data. Byebye planned scarcity.
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The tragedy of the commons, AI edition
https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/06/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-ai-edition
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235011
#HackerNews #tragedyOfTheCommons #AI #ethics #technology #innovation #digitalCommons
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NLnet; NLnet announces 60 projects strenghtening the digital commons
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⏳ Less than 100 days until the 2nd Digital Commons Policy Summit!
📍 Brussels
📅 12 November 2026
⏰ 09:00 - 18:00
🎫 https://commons.ngi.eu/event/digital-commons-policy-summit-2026/The conversation is moving from vision to implementation: how Digital Commons can power Europe's Open Internet Stack and deliver on the Tech Sovereignty Package and the EU Open Source Strategy.
See you there!
#DigitalCommons #OpenSource #TechSovereignty
@martelinnovate @openfuture @openforumeurope @cnrs @EC_NGI @EUCommission
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“This report proposes a conceptual tripod to make sense of this discontinuity. First, as Big Tech has attained ever greater power over the labor process of developers by using FOSS to set standards, a process of recursive deskilling has taken place resulting in bloat, burnout, and a loss of craft. Second, repeated failures of FOSS norms and organizations to resolve problems have brought about a legitimation crisis calling the implicit liberalism of FOSS into question. This loss of legitimacy pertains to deliberation as a means of decision-making and to licensing (both copyleft and permissive) as a means of empowerment and control. Third, ingrained habits and norms among technologists have turned into learning blockages that manifest in stagnation, regressive behaviors, and backlash. Next, the report presents insights from a workshop with members of three communities of practice in which technologists respond to the post-FOSS moment and its learning needs. They work on permacomputing, server collectives, and decentralized networking technologies. A discussion with members of these communities of practice brought to light multiple themes: they agree on the need for a substantive vision of computing, they draw inspiration widely from diverse forms of organization and governance, they recognize that vibes matter, and they seek to foster intrinsic joy. Taken together, these themes provide inklings of the collective learning process technologists are engaged in and of the repertoires they will draw on going forward. Recognizing that a cultural shift away from old orthodoxies is happening is a necessary starting point for expanding the map of technical practices that will shape the digital infrastructure of tomorrow.”
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The Digital Commons EDIC invites open source communities to put forward experts for its Advisory Board. DC-EDIC is a European consortium with a mission to advance the digital commons. The Advisory Board of 10 experts is to give advice, support with strategy development & work with the the DC-EDIC community network.
Deadline for application is September 7
https://digital-commons-edic.eu/news/2026-07-01-advisory-board-call-for-experts/ -
The #commons series I thought was done got a fourth part after @doctormo replied on here: free software protected the artefact but never built a way to pay for making it. Not an oversight, ideological.
Tip jars don't fix it. They're patronage, not a claim. What's missing is a membrane, the trust boundary paid work gets that free software never built for economic trust.
Valueflows/hREA already treat labour as a first-class event, code or not.
https://gaggl.com/blogs/2026-07-28-the-commons-has-no-ledger-for-this/
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Workers, producers, consumers, and others have been establishing cooperatives and other community-led associations to pool resources, share benefits, and address socioeconomic challenges for centuries. The United Nations marked 2025 as the year of cooperatives, positioning them as “essential solutions to today’s global problems,” kindling renewed interest in data collectives and cooperatives.
They cover a wide range: The Kerala Food Platform enables about 2,500 farmers in the southern Indian state to trace and market their produce, including rice, fish, fruits, and vegetables. Mexico-based PescaData helps small-scale fishers in Latin America and the Caribbean to manage and benefit from their catch records, while the Native BioData Consortium is a repository of the genetic and environmental data of Indigenous people.
Increasingly, data sets are being created for AI-related purposes, including in low-resource language communities, whose data, including voice data, is valuable for training small models and creating speech recognition tools. For these communities, a data collective is a more practical solution, [Raffi] Krikorian said.
https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-data-collectives-mozilla/
#digitalsovereignty #community #publicinteresttech #openweb #digitalcommons #cooperatives #coops #techcoops
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The mess, the Commons, and the Paths Out of Mess
https://hamishcampbell.com/the-deathcult-is-a-historical-metaphor/ We spend a lot of time talking about crises as if they're sudden events, they rarely are, crises are the outcome of decades of accumulated social, political, economic and technological choices. The challenge isn't simply understanding why societies enter periods of instability, it's understanding how they find their way back out again. History suggests something important - entering crisis is often easier than leaving it - […]https://hamishcampbell.com/the-mess-the-commons-and-the-paths-out-of-mess/
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The Commons Has No Ledger for This
A three-part series on licensing and the economics of digital sovereignty was planned: how the commons got built, how Europe is choosing to defend it, how the AI stack could be governed as one. Then Martin Owens, an Inkscape developer and member of its project leadership committee, replied to part one on Mastodon, in two posts stitched together by the character limit, and pointed straight at something the series had missed entirely.https://web.brid.gy/r/https://gaggl.com/blogs/2026-07-28-the-commons-has-no-ledger-for-this/
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Software is behind virtually every modern scientific breakthrough. We’re preserving computing history to keep research open, verifiable, and reproducible forever.
🔎 Search the archive: https://archive.softwareheritage.org
#OpenScience #ReproducibleResearch #SourceCode #DigitalCommons -
"Existing collective management infrastructure is designed to distribute remuneration to professional rights-holders. That is a legitimate function, but an insufficient one. The training of foundation models has not drawn exclusively on the professional content economy. It has drawn on the whole open web: on public domain works, open access research, the digitized collections of libraries and archives, and content produced and shared by individuals and communities with no expectation of commercial return. A levy whose distribution logic cannot reach these contributors is not a solution to the problem of AI extractivism — it is a redistribution of rents within the commercial information economy, leaving the commons itself uncompensated. The appropriate response to extraction at this scale is not individual remuneration — most of the information that powers AI systems cannot be reliably traced to specific creators, and the transaction costs of doing so would be prohibitive — but collective redistribution: funding the institutions and infrastructure that sustain public information production for everyone, including professional creators. This requires making explicit political choices about who counts as a contributor to the information ecosystem: open access publishers, cultural heritage institutions, public service media, Wikipedia and similar openly governed knowledge projects, and — as discussed below — public AI infrastructure."
https://botpopuli.net/who-pays-for-the-commons/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Copyright #IP #LLMs #Commons #DigitalCommons
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"Paying an electricity bill with #crypto is a poetic inversion of #Web3's early narrative. For years, #blockchains were criticized for consuming massive amounts of grid energy to secure abstract data. At #RedemptionHill, we are seeing the exact opposite: abstract digital tokens are being used to protect, maintain, and expand real-world, biological energy systems.
This is what the transition to a #RootedSociety looks like. It is the practical execution of #MichelBauwens’ #cosmolocal vision. It is not found in complex derivatives or carbon credits traded in skyscraper boardrooms. It is found on a farm in #MinasGerais, where a brother and sister have mastered both the successional cycles of the soil and the tools of the #digitalcommons." -
Market vs state isn't the whole story on AI governance. There's a third way with 150 years behind it: the commons (Ostrom, Nobel 2009).
The AI stack has 5 commons-like layers: data, compute, models, knowledge, energy. Open weights alone don't fix it; LAION-5B is open but ungoverned, and Common Voice is both.
Australia has no public compute to match the US/EU, and just shelved its mandatory AI guardrails for voluntary standards.
https://gaggl.com/blogs/2026-07-20-ai-stack-needs-a-governor/
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📍 NGI Commons is on its way to #Wikimania2026 in Paris!
👉 This year marks 25 years of Wikipedia, and the theme: Freedom, Equity, Reliability! Which reminds us why digital commons matter more than ever.
📣 Excited to meet Wikimedians and the wider commons community, exchange ideas, and help build a more open, resilient, and inclusive internet.
🇫🇷 See you in Paris ✨
https://commons.ngi.eu/event/wikimania-2026/ -
In 1976, Bill Gates called hobbyists thieves for sharing software they'd written for each other. A property claim, not a philosophy. It's happening again, bigger.
The digital commons wasn't destroyed; it was absorbed: a free fix for cut services, industry-funded R&D, cloud enclosure that stops copyleft triggering.
AI goes further: it trains on the commons, floods it with slop, and isolates contributors chat by chat.
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🌍 We just got back from Dweb Camp, hosted by the Internet Archive in the German forest — and what a gathering.
Alongside @commonsnetwork @goteo_fund and friends across the Fediverse, we presented the Democratic Tech Fund prototype and ran sessions on governance, P2P financing, and community-owned social spaces.
Full report on our site 👇
https://freeknowledge.eu/notes_from_DwebCamp_building_the_DemocraticTech.Fund_with_a_wider_community#DigitalCommons #Fediverse #DemocraticTech #DTF #DwebCamp #Dweb
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What the Commons Built (And What's Taking It Apart)
In 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists accusing them of stealing. What they were actually doing was sharing software they had written for each other (modifications, tools, documentation), the way people had shared knowledge since the first person showed another how to do something useful. Gates reframed mutual aid as intellectual property theft. It was not a philosophical claim. It was a property claim, backed by lawyers, Congress, and eventually the World Trade Organization.https://web.brid.gy/r/https://gaggl.com/blogs/2026-07-14-what-the-commons-built/