Digital Commons | An Inclusive Technology Ecosystem

COVID-19 brought attention to and intensified the role that digital technology plays in our daily lives. However, one of the most unfair and dysfunctional parts of our society as a whole is the digital ecosystem. How can we create a digital ecology that guarantees prosperity and widely shared participation?

While there have been some notable achievements made by both the private sector-driven ecosystems in much of the West and the state-driven ecosystems in places like China and India, neither has been able to combine the elements of broadly distributed opportunity and democratic accountability that were essential to the 20th century's equitable economic growth of democracies.

Adopting a different perspective that views technological infrastructure as a digital commons may indicate the path towards a diverse, long-lasting ecosystem that benefits society. Part of the solution might be to reframe our perceptions of technology and the economic principles that underpin its creation and use. Resources like air, water, and a habitable planet are becoming more and more like essential technologies; these resources should be available to and maintained for all members of society. Stated differently, a resource based on the commons. By adopting an Ostromian perspective and viewing technology as a digital commons, we can develop more adaptable, responsive, and regenerative mechanisms for the application of technology.

Taipei, which attributes a large portion of its swift economic expansion and COVID-19 response to an ecosystem of community-stewarded technology creation and deployment, may have the strongest case for broadening the digital commons. For instance, g0v, a collective hacking organisation, and Audrey Tang, the digital minister, collaborated to develop a commons-oriented architecture for data coalitions that enables ownership and active involvement in shared information.

By collecting pollution data nationwide, this infrastructure has outperformed costly, centralised sensors employed by the government and commercial industry. This has allowed players in various sectors to build upon this rich, shared data. The infrastructure was rearranged to facilitate the collaborative creation of tools to counteract COVID-19, ranging from mask rationing platforms to contact tracing applications, by utilising open protocols and APIs. 

To enable these open systems to flourish on their own, corporations will need to acknowledge the part these systems play in sustaining their profits and provide knowledge and substantial financial assistance. Nonetheless, the public sector shouldn't be the only one involved in the creation and implementation of Digital Commons. Theoretically, this would also make sense because the "commons" transcend the boundaries between the public and private spheres. 

To foster a sustainable ecosystem of innovation independent of venture capitalists and big businesses, governments must advance the real regulation of privately controlled systems, be open to absorbing democratic tools and processes from the social sector through hackathons and government endorsements of civil sector innovations, and provide funding.

Even though not all resources can or should be managed as commons, the g0v case highlights certain aspects of the digital infrastructure that would particularly profit from this approach: open source software, identity and payment standards, social communications protocols, infrastructure for sharing data and computation, large machine learning models trained on data generated within a Creative Commons framework, and open source software.

A recent World Economic Forum paper on the markets of the future underlined the need for new governance frameworks for resources like data and artificial intelligence, and digital commons could provide a solution. Data is well-suited to a commons framework because its inputs and impacts are inherently shared. Sharing access to these resources fosters bottom-up innovation and advances technology while privatising or siloing them makes it harder to oversee the interests of the group as a whole. When combined, they provide a common layer that is essential for both democratic engagement and economic growth. 

Bibliography 

Carlberg, A. N. (2023, July 18). Digital Commons: Open Technologies bringing value to citizens at a grand scale. OpenForum Europe. https://openforumeurope.org/digital-commons-open-technologies-bringing-value-to-citizens-at-a-grand-scale/

World Economic Forum. (2021, June 2). The case for the Digital Commons. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/the-case-for-the-digital-commons/