CS/DC Community Supported Digital Commons

CS/DC (Community Supported Digital Commons) is a network of free software projects that use and build upon existing network protocols, partnerships and ideas, based on solidarity economy principles. Inspired by the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, the CSDC would build small communities that directly address the expressed digital needs of communities. They would be stewarded by several organizations together and prioritize community-centered design, maintenance and repair.

We also recognized that there were several values and approaches that overlap between these prototypes, including:

• Learning and sharing best practices for making these projects financially sustainable, while transitioning out of capitalist financial practices and exploitative labor models.
• Strengthening IRL (in person) connections and ensuring that technologies are based on local community needs.
• The acknowledgement of planetary boundaries and maintaining conscious awareness of ecological impacts of the software and hardware that is utilized.
• Building on existing open, interoperable, and legacy protocols and software that enables transparency, privacy and autonomy.

CS/DC was initially prototyped as a at the DisCO Remastered Workshop in September 2023.

Overview

CS/DC gathers FLOSS projects that use and build upon existing network protocols, partnerships and ideas. They emphasize community-centered design, maintenance and repair. They share resources and reject the idea of making new tech. Instead of that, they are projects that emerge from and among several different organisations.

CS/DC DisCO Principles

1: Values-Based Design

• Highlights the hidden costs and human/ecological impacts of digital infrastructure
• Rejects cronyism, nepotism, corruption and elitism

2: Whole-Community Governance

• Co-created Governance Modeling, balancing accountability and fairness
• Cultivates relationships between communities, digital artisans and stewards
• Prioritizes community sensemaking and collective memory
• Rejects the tyranny of purists

3: Active Creators of Commons

• Highlights pro-bono exchange ( Lovework)
• Creates Digital Commons in service to other commons
• Co-creates relevant documentation (including easy-to-read formats)

4: Rethinking Global/Local Economics

• Promotes SMEs that support local needs
• Focuses on the relationships between local community projects (as service providers) and global networks/repos/infrastructure
• Encourages globally federated digital territories for networked solidarity

5: Carework is the Core

• Understands that digital tech is oppresive when human agency is stripped
• Promotes community-supported/led/centered tech with care as a central focus
• Integrates care practices into communication and federation building.
• Promotes intra-DisCO Mentorship and Mutual Support
• Stewards resources for expressed needs, such as virtual office suites, publication, social media etc
• Avoids techno-broism

6: Origins and Flows of Value

• Adaptive Licenses and Pricing based on circunstances
• Shifts from grants and subsidies to community supported and funded work
• Explores possibilities for intra-DisCO Lovework and Carework

7: Primed for Federation

• Promotes critical digital literacy in performance and art
• Rents and maintains servers, moderating digital comms spaces
• Uses existing network protocols, open hardware repair, reuse + partnership ideas
• How to do more with less: Maintenance for shared repos and infrastructure.