White Paper | Digital Commons: Values and path to sustainability

This white paper on Digital Commons in Europe provides a synthesis of the 100-pages report D1.1 mapping Active communities of commoners and relevant commons of the NGI Commons European project on Open Source and Internet Commons for Europe’s Digital Sovereignty. 

Based on a review of literature and 23 interviews, which transcripts are shared as open data (available on Nakala scientific data repository), this report provides a mapping based on extensive interviews as a way to better understand the diversity of the Digital Commons. After a first dive into the history and the definitions of the concept by scholars and with regards to Free Libre Open Source Software and Digital Public, we summarise the beliefs and imaginaries we were able to identify as shared amongst multiple interviewees of 14 active communities of Digital and Internet commoners.

We then focus on the sustainability models these Digital Commons mobilize and how they customize their structures to their needs. The last section aims at understanding whether and how interviewees use the concept of Digital Commons in their practice, and what values they associate with this concept.