A small number of large technology companies control core parts of today’s digital infrastructure. Public administrations and public service media depend on them for critical services, creating long term lock ins, security risks and vulnerabilities to capture. Decentralization is one of the DWeb’s central promises: less dependency on dominant platforms, more agency for communities and individuals, and infrastructures that can be governed in the public interest. But decentralization does not automatically produce these outcomes. A system can be technically distributed while power remains concentrated in standards, hosting, app stores, moderation rules, funding structures, or maintenance capacity.

This session is a 60 minute participatory workshop that invites participants to explore decentralization explicitly as a value and governance choice. Therefore this workshop is built around shared inquiry in small groups. The facilitators bring a small set of working assumptions and hypotheses that have emerged from research and stakeholder workshops on decentralization in German public institutions. Examples include the idea that technical decentralization without explicit governance structures tends to create new central gatekeepers, or that decentralization only supports democratic control when openness, interoperability and reversibility are anchored in binding requirements rather than left to goodwill.

After a short introduction to this tension and the assumptions on the table, participants work in mixed groups. Each group takes one assumption, tests it against its members’ concrete experiences and asks where it fits, where it fails and what it overlooks in terms of power, labor and risk. On this basis participants can rewrite or qualify “their” assumption so that it better reflects practice and makes clearer under which conditions decentralization actually acts as a value. In a final round, the groups bring their revised assumptions back into the room. By comparing the changes and insights across groups, the workshop surfaces recurring conditions, divergent experiences and unresolved tensions.

The session is embedded in a project by D64 – Zentrum für Digitalen Fortschritt: Decentralization as Value and Practice funded by JUST Open Source. The project investigates how decentralized approaches can become practical alternatives in public administration and public service media, with clear preconditions such as open standards, open source, transparent governance and meaningful participation. It combines mapping, surveys and expert interviews with stakeholders in administrations, broadcasters and civil society, and will result in a white paper and an interactive decentralization tool for institutions. The workshop will produce a shared “conditions map” for decentralization as democratic practice: revised assumptions, recurring tensions, warning signs for new gatekeepers, and practical conditions such as openness, interoperability, reversibility, accountable governance, and meaningful participation.