Reviewing "Public Digital Infrastructure" and "Digital Commons" Funding
Yesterday I had the pleasure to join an expert meeting on public funding of digital commons and public digital infrastructure in the European Union. For several reasons, many of us agree that it is crucial to invest (also) public money in digital infrastructure that functions according to public values, based on free software and open source and open standards, or more generally in digital commons. The meeting was convened in the context of the
NGI Commons project, part of the Next Generation Internet programme by the European Commission.
Now is an important time, as Von der Leyen and her team are negotiating the priorities of the different funding schemes by the EC for the coming years.
In a nutshell:
There are existing funding schemes that focus really on open source and digital commons, like the NGI0 and NGI Commons programmes, but also the German government's Sovereign Tech Fund. All of these could be scaled up to make more impact. Then there are much larger existing programmes like Horizon Europe, Digital Europe Programme, Connecting Europe Facility - Digital and Resilience and Recovery Facility / Next Gen EU. These programmes typically have a preference for Open Source, Open standards and interoperability, but no specific funding lines. They should have stronger requirements for open source.
And last there are several proposed and new funding schemes in the works, such as the EDIC for Digital Commons. EDIC is a new legal entity model that resembles a cooperative formed by European Member States. Since the French brought together a majority of Member States around the
Towards a Sovereign Digital Infrastructure of Commons report in 2022, an EDIC for Digital Commons is being set up. Several Member States, such as France, The Netherlands, Estonia and Germany amongst others are committed to this. Important steps for the setup have been made (see
progress). Also there are various proposals for Public Digital Infrastructure Funds to be included in the Horizon Europe programme, such as the one by
Open Future.
