2026-07-10 –, Birch Salon
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.
Part 1: Immersive Role Play: Who decides? Who owns? How is value redistributed? (45 min, Olivier Schulbaum)
Every organisation already plays a game. The question is: who wrote the rules, and who benefits from them?
Olivier Schulbaum will lead an immersive role play session inspired by Platoniq's Think Like a Platform methodology. This approach treats organisations not as fixed structures but as platforms of relationships — systems in which decisions, resources, and value either circulate or fail to circulate. What organisational charts usually hide becomes visible here: flows of power, forms of participation, and the often invisible rules that shape who benefits and who sustains the system.
The role play unfolds through a deliberately provocative metaphor: a game of baseball. Four bases structure the field, each representing a different stakeholder position — communities, funders, builders and maintainers, and the core coordinating team. Each position embodies a different relationship to value and a different capacity to influence the game. Participants step into these roles and, from within them, begin to see what governance actually does — as opposed to what it claims to do.
The exercise surfaces questions that are often implicit but rarely addressed directly: where authority is located versus where it is merely performed; who carries the system when funding disappears; who absorbs uncertainty and maintenance; and what funding quietly reshapes in return.
From there, the role play takes a turn. The metaphor of baseball is brought in not as a neutral game, but as a form of capitalist entertainment built on fixed positions, clear winners, and value measured through accumulation. Participants are invited to unsettle it — to flip the inherited model, disrupt the default logic, and reimagine the field itself. Roles shift, value begins to circulate differently, and cooperation starts to replace competition. The question that closes this part is simple and generative: if the DTF is already a platform, who has the power to rewrite its code?
Part 2: Co-design: translating insights into governance models and next steps (35 min, Wouter Tebbens, Sophie Bloemen and Martijn de Waal)
Building on what the role play makes visible, this co-design session moves from reflection to construction. Public software requires the collaboration of multiple stakeholders — not only in the initial development of a product, but in an ongoing process of making, implementing, and evaluating. That requires an institutional form capable of governing both the software itself and the values that underpin it.
Rather than aiming for a single solution, the goal is to map a space of possibilities. Drawing directly on the insights and tensions surfaced in the role play, participants work in small groups to sketch different ways of organising responsibility, distributing power, and ensuring long-term sustainability for democratic tech initiatives. Who should be part of such an institution? What safeguards must protect its public and commons-oriented mission? What can we learn, visually and structurally, from what the role play revealed?
The session closes with a grounded, practical question: what does this mean for the DTF's next three months?
Timeline: Role play (45') → Co-design (35') → Closing synthesis (10')
Wouter Tebbens is an industrial engineer born and raised in The Netherlands working from Barcelona. He works for a knowledge society based in human freedom, solidarity, care and regeneration through commons-cooperative networks. He has co-founded and participates in various cooperatives and social organisations.
In the 2000s he set up the Free/Libre and Open Source working group of the Internet Society Netherlands, co-founded the Free Knowledge Institute and coordinated two European Commission funded projects: the SELF project and the Free Technology Academy and participated in various others.
In the last decade he participated in Som Energia, the Spanish renewable energy cooperative; the School of the Commons Barcelona; was part of the p2p value research team studying >300 cases of commons-based p2p internet platforms; participated in the Digital DIY project on legal, ethical and economic aspects related to digital fabrication and DIY; co-founded The Things Network Catalonia and ran various pilots and projects with various municipalities around sensor data through the community network.
In order to seek sustainability for commons-oriented initiatives he conceived the Five Pillar model. In the context especially of la Comunificadora, a programme from Barcelona City to help teams create their commons-collaborative economy project, this model was developed further as the core organising model with specific canvases and workshop methodologies.
Wouter was one of the artifices behind the creation of the cooperative femProcomuns and helped create the initial projects and move them from under the wings of the FKI to the cooperative, including CommonsCloud, the open community network for the Internet of Things and the commons transition group.
Since the pandemic he has been an operational member of The Online Meeting Cooperative (meet.coop), he has worked as the first director of the PublicSpaces Foundation in The Netherlands, is a collaborator at Commons Network and works in various projects to advance a commons-cooperative-regenerative vision.