06.06, 17:00–17:45 (Europe/Zurich), Aquädukt
While EU member states provide ample legal frameworks for public benefit organizations [1], there is currently no established legal pathway for these organizations to assume stewardship of digital commons.
We argue that the UN concept of digital public goods [2] and the legal concept of stewardship in the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) [3] should enable reliable maintenance of digital infrastructures through public benefit organizations.
This talk will explore what constitutes digital commons— such as code, datasets, open content, AI models, ans services (e.g., Let’s Encrypt, Mastodon) — and how public benefit stewardship of these commons could be structured to ensure trust and reliability for them to serve as digital infrastructure.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2023/753422/IPOL_STU(2023)753422_EN.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_public_goods
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAHGb-X38L4&t=98
The talk will give an overview on the current work to establish a public benefit ecosystem to maintain the digital commons as the foundation of any digital ecosystem.
Over the last two years this work has brought together open-source foundation like Apache and Eclipse, as well as European open source projects such as codeberg and Mastodon as well as household names amongst them Wikipedia and the Open Source Initiative. It included interesting exchanges with insurance companies as well industry associations.
The work spans from policy advocacy work both on the European level as well as the member state level, as work on a regulatory, technical and standards level in international working groups with the Eclipse Foundation and the IETF.
With regards to the EU level this included the implementation of the Cyber Resilience Act and the Open Digital European Ecosystem strategy of the EU. On the member state level this included advocating for the public-benefit recognition of the digital commons as well as discussion how said public benefit status for digital commons would not allow to disrupt the digital single market within the EU.
For those interested the body of the work can be found at:
https://codeberg.org/dcsi
Gregor "Little Detritus" Bransky has been involved in public digital infrastructure policies for nearly a decade. He started in 2017 as a member of Freifunk Aachen, Aachens open wireless mesh community, and contributed to the discussion around WiFi4EU.
In March 2020, he became co-team lead of "wir-bleiben-liquid.de", one of the 20 winning teams of the #WirVsVirus Hackathon organized by the German government. The team is also amongst the winner teams of the #EUvsVirus Hackathon.
Since March 2021, Gregor has been a founding member and acting board member for policy and press at Innovationverbund Öffentliche Gesundheit e.V., a civic-tech project dedicated to building public digital infrastructures that empower society.