Public-interest technology does not survive through code alone. Digital commons require continuous coordination between communities, institutions, maintainers, contributors, and funders — structures capable not only of building tools, but of caring for them over time: setting priorities, distributing responsibilities, managing conflicts, and protecting the values embedded within the infrastructure itself. This session moves from strategic principles to institutional architecture, using role play and co-design to collectively work out what governance for democratic technology actually looks like in practice — and what it means for the Democratic Tech Fund right now.

This is a panel of long-running movement builders from Free Software campaigning, platform cooperatives, rural deliberative governance, and cross-sector bridging work. These folks will share what worked, what broke, and what they'd do differently to help others in designing campaigns, cooperatives, and coalitions that are shaping change in society.

Speakers on the panel include:

Matthias Kirschner (Free Software Foundation Europe) presenting on "Public Money? Public Code!" (PMPC), a movement started in 2017, that has been one of the most successful campaigns for digital rights. Matthias will unpack the specific choices that let a single campaign framework grow into a movement of more than 200 civil society organizations and over 39,000 individuals worldwide.

Guil Maueler (Regens Unite) brings five years of gathering climate activists, cooperators, DAO builders, ReFi protocols, DeSci collectives, artists, and policy nerds into the same room.

Olivier Schulbaum (Platoniq Foundation, Democratic Tech Fund) will share about solidarity funding infrastructure Goteo.rg, drawing lessons from 15 years of supporting community-led initiatives through crowdfunding, matchfunding, and what we now frame as "crowdvocacy." Concrete cases he'll discuss include street vendors’ organising, La Nuestra, a testimonial digital archive against gender-based violence, and emerging models from renters and care workers such as Las Kellys.

Ray Xiang closes the loop with Nantang, a rural reconstruction community in China with more than 20 years of cooperative organizing, whose experiments with mutual aid, local deliberation, and — more recently — DAO governance and digital identity tools show both the promise and the fragility of building shared rules, records, and trust in a living, ordinary community.

This panel is a working conversation about the thin, hard-won connective tissue between movements that share goals but rarely share a table.