We are living through a decisive moment. Big Tech is openly aligning itself with autocratic political forces, extracting value from communities, and accelerating ecological collapse — all while monopolising the digital infrastructure that shapes how we communicate, organise, and live. And yet: the alternatives already exist. Thousands of projects, communities, and cooperatives across the world have been quietly building open, democratic, decentralised technology for decades. The question is no longer whether it's possible. The question is how we connect it, grow it, and sustain it.
The Democratic Tech Fund (DTF) is a response to that question. It is a transnational initiative rooted in four pillars, each addressing a structural dimension of the problem.
Open source and free knowledge are the foundation. Collaborative, freely licensed software is not only technically superior — it is the democratic alternative to proprietary enclosure. But open source alone has not been enough. Google, Microsoft, and Meta have all built empires on collectively produced knowledge and code, including now the training data for their AI systems. The DTF recognises that openness is necessary but insufficient without the social and economic structures to protect and sustain it.
Decentralisation addresses the architecture of power. The early internet was built on open standards and interoperable protocols. Web 2.0 reversed that — platform capitalism replaced distributed infrastructure with centralised silos and hyperscale monopolies. The DTF is committed to a different web: one built with and for local communities, at the scale of cities and regions, interconnected and federated rather than controlled by a single company. Thousands of smaller communities, collaborating on shared goals, are not a weakness — they are the design.
The cooperative social and solidarity economy brings two centuries of worker and user self-organisation into the digital age. This is more than a legal form: it is a political commitment to divest from neoliberal extractivism and invest in a humanist, convivial economy. Concrete examples already show what's possible — CommonsCloud, initiated a decade ago in Barcelona, is a multistakeholder cooperative of workers and users running open source cloud services for hundreds of organisations and individuals. Platform cooperatives, worker-owned delivery networks, democratic video infrastructure: these exist, they work, and they need support to grow.
Commoning — the practice of collectively governing shared resources under democratically agreed rules — is perhaps the oldest human economic tradition, and one of the most needed. The DTF is itself an attempt at commoning: members contribute what they can (time, money, expertise), draw on shared resources, and govern together under shared principles. It prioritises contributions over market exchange and community accountability over extraction.
The DTF was founded in summer 2025 by Free Knowledge Institute, Commons Network, Waag Futurelab, and Fundación Platoniq/Goteo, following a co-creation gathering hosted by the Internet Archive in Amsterdam. It is now in prototype mode — and this talk shares what that looks like in practice.
The funding model is deliberately bottom-up, operating in stages. A base-level transition community of member organisations and individuals supports each other's shift towards digital autonomy, pooling time and resources. From within that community, local Funding Circles form to seed promising projects. Those projects then go to public crowdfunding — on platforms like Goteo — where crowd contributions are matched by public and private institutional funders, multiplying the impact of grassroots solidarity.
The DTF is not primarily a funding mechanism. It is an attempt to build the social capacity for the transition towards digital autonomy — connecting local and international networks, from Digital Independence days in Germany to cooperative cloud federations, and asking collectively: what is missing, what is most needed, what do we build next?
We go slowly because we want to reach far. Together we already have so much — let's share it, connect it, and build something that lasts.