Let’s tech better decisions (hehe)

Last week, the European Commission adopted the Tech Sovereignty Package, “an ambitious set of measures to bolster the EU’s digital autonomy.” The package is a broad, cross-sectional push that signals a shift from a key focus on regulation to actively building and strengthening tech capacity, and, which, at its core, recognises what we have long argued at IMS: democracies need healthy digital infrastructures to function.

However, better and safer digital infrastructures are funded on more than local data centres, open-sourced AI, and self-produced chips. For example, an EU-built social media platform optimised for engagement and ad revenue is still harmful — wherever the servers sit. Europe needs solutions that are built to protect fundamental rights, support democratic participation, and safeguard independent journalism. And how to develop these solutions? Well, some of the most rigorous public interest digital infrastructure in the world is being built right now by teams who didn’t wait for a sovereignty package to do it:

Tanzania’s JamiiAfrica started as a message board in 2006 and grew into one of the most consequential civic platforms on the African continent, where citizens can anonymously report corruption, governance failures, and local grievances in Swahili, and where those reports have prompted real legislative responses. At times the platform has outperformed both local news outlets and major social media platforms in reach and public trust.

Mutante is an independent media initiative in Colombia that since 2018 has treated journalism as a participatory process, helping citizens, experts, and officials address complex problems like sexual violence, inequality, and climate change. They reach people on mainstream social media, but have developed their own moderation practices to engage local communities in constructive dialogue and action. They are already training other media organisations and NGOs in their methodology.

IMS is part of Good Commons, a collective that connects and promotes public interest infrastructure –projects like these around the world. They are evidence of a design methodology that should apply to any digital tool: start with a specific community and a specific problem; build with and for the people who will use it; establish security, privacy, and accountability by default; and measure success by whether people are better connected, more secure and able to make informed decisions.

Europe has a great deal to learn from these non-European examples. If Europe is serious about protecting democracies, access to information and press freedom, it should invest in both hard- and software designed around public interest values: inclusion, accountability, and safety. That is the difference between reproducing dependency and harms in a new location and creating a genuinely democratic digital future.

For more details about Good Commons