IN COMMON
Public platform to map and act together for the Commons
IN COMMON emerged as a transnational European collective from a network of non-profit actors to identify, promote, and defend the Commons. We decided to start a common pool for Information Technologies with the aim to create, maintain, and share with the public geo-localized data that belong to our constituents and to articulate citizen movements around a free, public and common platform to map and act together for the Commons. IN COMMON forms a cooperative data library that provides collective maintenance to ensure data is always accurate.
- The project's own website: https://incommon.cc/
Why does this actually matter to end users?
Users have a right to internet access and should be sure that the rights they have offline are also protected online. The internet is not just a technology or a communication medium anymore, as these declarations from the United Nations show, it has become a crucial building block of our society, economy, democracy and the way we work, live and come together. And just like in the real world, this means that there should be a public space online, a digital commons: places where everyone has free access to knowledge, can join the discussion and exercise their basic human rights. In these spaces, users should be sure they can move and act freely, without worrying about being monitored, paying for access or being categorized or treated differently.
In Common is an initiative of civic activists and organizations to help people connect with public digital commons and learn them use free and decentralized communication tools, like for example the social media service Mastodon that users can host themselves. This is a collaborative effort that can benefit from more cooperation and sharing of relevant services and knowledge. People should be able to easily search for and discover public spaces in their area to enjoy a good talk or discussion, learn more about their neighborhood and how they can help and pick up some cool and useful open source services along the way. Through this project In Common wants to create an interactive map of the commons where civil activists and organizations can safely, easily and both on- and offline find each other and add relevant information. Tying public spaces closer together can make internet users more aware of the importance of (digital) commons and ultimately strengthen their online agency and data governance.
Run by Reseau Transition
This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.
