2026-07-09 –, Birch Salon
As European policy moves towards support for an open Internet stack, we need to create sustainable, organizational vehicles to steward the society-scale products of these efforts.
For over 15 years, the Foundation for Public Code has worked with public administrations and their vendors to build largest scale collaborative networks around codebases that serve as digital public infrastructure and digital public goods. Initially often this work consisted of helping municipalities and states build capacity to architect, deliver and maintain code bases in collaboration with a large network of peer institutions. These pieces of software infrastructure provide digital services like school system management, traffic management, participatory urbanism, and other key functions, both internally to public administration and to residents.
In the last few years, we have come to realize that often these collaborative efforts can end poorly unless a suitable stewardship vehicle is created to sustainably coordinate and manage the efforts of all the participants around maintaining and developing the tool or platform that has been successfully deployed in its first context or two. To address this we have developed a policy proposal for a new form of NGO that we call the Public Product Organization.
Ben Cerveny is the president and chairman of the Foundation for Public Code. His work concerns the fundamental relationship of computation with society.
For more than 25 years Ben has worked as an executive, strategist, and designer in the context of operating systems, media applications, web services, products, the built environment, and digital games.
Before founding the Foundation for Public Code, he was a Design Fellow at Samsung, working with design teams across the company and leading a project on room-scale programmable environments.
Previously, he helped design the massively multiplayer game about collaborative creativity online that became Flickr [and also named it], founded the Experience Design Lab at Frogdesign, and was founder and CEO of Bloom Studios, whose data visualization iPad app Planetary was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution.
He has written and lectured extensively, and taught at UCLA, New York University, and the University College London. He serves on the advisory council of the Digital Public Goods Alliance and the steering committee of the UN/ITU GovStack project.