A digital public space is essential for a healthy democratic society. That was the tagline of this year’s Public Spaces Conference, taking part last week in Amsterdam, drawing hundreds of people from across the world who wholeheartedly agreed. But how do we make that happen?

I have taken - admittedly a bit liberally - three provocations from Robin Berjon's amazing opening keynote that I think could point us in the right direction.

1. Strategize, don't just theorize

Public values, European values, technological sovereignty, transparency and privacy, safe and inclusive digital spaces: we have crafted long lists of goals and values we seek to embody in the technologies we need to create for our democratic societies. Great, but the risk is that we remain philosophizing about those values and lose ourselves in abstraction. There's no shortage of calls or manifestos for 'European values in tech.' But values without strategy run the risk of becoming empty vessels.

Strategy, as Berjon framed it, is the art of creating power. And power in the digital realm starts with who owns the infrastructure and can set the conditions through which it operates. If you own the infrastructure, you set the rules. As of yet, it is mostly Big Tech who’s in charge there.

That didn't happen by accident. Berjon reminded us of Clinton & Gore’s framework for global electronic commerce that explicitly stated that the private sector should lead, and governments should merely encourage self-regulation, refraining from unnecessary regulations. Well, we know what that has lead to. Over the past decades, we have de facto become subjects of private governments.

So, we need a counter strategy. And that is not building 'European champions', as several speakers pointed out during the conference. ‘European’ does not by itself mean that it is better than American. If these European players just copy the extractive logic of their Silicon Valley counterparts, we’ll get different players, but not really a more democratic society. That’s just sovereignty washing, Geert-Jan Bogaerts stated.

Technological infrastructure should be built publicly, as an essential provision for society. France currently spends €2 billion a year on software licenses. Imagine what you could do if even a fraction of that went into shared public infrastructure instead. In a panel on digital rights Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann made a similar point. We need governments that stimulate these developments, acting as launching customers for public alternatives, not just as cautious regulators that don’t want to step on Donald Trump’s toes.

The search for viable business models to sustain public infrastructure also led to some discussion in the movement. I think most agreed that business could play a role in building and even managing such infrastructures, if there are the right safeguards in place. For instance by taking on a steward-ownership model. But should we take tens or hundreds of millions from venture capitalists, even if they say that they are not looking for extractive business models? Rely on philanthropy?

Many of these questions came together in the Roadmap for Civic Social Media that Public Spaces director Jantien Borsboom presented in the Next Socials panel I moderated. It maps the components for a broader strategy as moving towards democratic technologies is not just about the tech infrastructure itself. It also encompasses the broader value systems, and layers of organisations, governance and applications.

Another tangible outcome of the conference: the launch of european.social, a joint declaration for the European Social Stack. It brings together Mastodon, Bluesky/Eurosky, Modal Foundation, New_Public, PublicSpaces, and many others around eight shared principles: digital autonomy, decentralised governance, diverse ownership models, strengthening democracy. Critically, it's not about picking one winning protocol, the Fediverse (ActivityPub), Atmosphere (AT Protocol), or Matrix for private messaging, but understanding them as complementary layers of the same stack.

2. Democracy, not decentralization

This provocation by Berjon was quite interesting. Decentralization has become something of a magic word in our circles. Let’s build technologies that are governed by their users and see if we can federate them into larger systems.

That’s great, but such an ideology could also turn against itself, Berjon warned. There is a risk it becomes some sort of a leftist libertarianism: it’s about exit, retreating into our own servers and software. But what about the collective, society at large, the civic infrastructure that everyone needs, not just the technically literate, for a democracy to function?

The importance of that became clear in Erin Kissane ’s keynote. She pointed out how through the past decades the substrate of collective knowledge, embodied through local journalism, public broadcasting, civic institutions, libraries, universities etc. has been hollowed out. As individuals we seem to overestimate our own knowledge, whereas we often rely on the collective knowledge stored and circulating in various cultural systems and institutions.

Meanwhile we're being flooded with information filtered by algorithmic systems that serve their owners, not society. The result, Kissane argued, is what she called "knowledge collapse": we think we understand things we actually don't, because the institutions that held that knowledge are fragmenting.

What we need are technologies that strengthen democratic society at scale: collective governance, multi-stakeholder moderation, shared infrastructure with real accountability. Not exit options, but civic tools.

Again, this means it is not just about creating the technologies, but also about sustaining the organisations that play a role in curating and circulating knowledge and culture in such systems: libraries, journalism, broadcasters, cultural organisations. In my own mind, the debate about digital sovereignty focuses too much on the technological infrastructures, and still not enough on the organisational and governance issues needed to sustain democratic and cultural practices in such an ecosystem.

Ship demos, not memos

One of the most energizing things about this conference was how much was actually being built.

In a panel on growth and sustainability of the open social web @Felix Hlatky, Rudolph Fraser , Rose Wang and Sebastian Vogelsang discussed the workings of Mastodon, Blacksky, Bluesky and Eurosky, already uniting tens of millions of users across the world.

In our own panels on Mentaal.nl and The Next Socials, Sander van der Waal, Mathijn Elhorst Jantien Borsboom Esther Hammelburg, PhD Paulien Kreutzer and Bert Stavenuiter showed how much traction the movement has gained over the last year in The Netherlands. Dutch journalism organisations and companies have started to incorporate Fediverse-technologies, Dutch Public Broadcasting is embracing a community-centered approach and wants to build its own infrastructure for that. And Mentaal.nl is a coalition of 13 patient organisations in the mental health domain that want to develop their own ecosystem for safe and trusted information and peer-support.

Developed with mental health organizations through a co-creation process, it's exploring what a digital public space in the mental health domain actually needs: low-threshold exploration without stigma, peer-to-peer contact alongside professional information, a sliding scale from anonymous reading to active community participation. Not a platform optimized for engagement, but one designed for care.

This is a project we are involved in ourselves with our Civic Interaction Design Research group. What we try to do here is take a design perspective in the development of these demos. For us the starting point is not the technology itself, but the needs of users and their organisations and their concretization of public values at stake.

These, we aim to translate to not just an engaging user interface and its underlying tech, but to a ‘stack’ of layers, including organisatinal practices and procedures (e.g. who will be responsible for moderation, how do we organize community stewardship) and governance, exploring how a coalition of more than 10 organization could work together to collaboratively steward the development of such an instance of what we see as a digital public space.

A sense of urgency — and still too little money

There was an energy at the public spaces conference that feels different from three years ago. It had become more focused, more concrete moving away from setting the agenda toward showcasing what alternatives could actually look like.

And there are some broader developments that could help this movement. There is again a Dutch state secretary for digital affairs in our new government - although it is telling that this policy field has moved away from internatl to economic affairs. There's a new EDIC on digital commons. And the EU published its tech sovereignty package last week, calling for investments in public infrastructure and organizations for open source stewardship.

Yet most of these are dots on the horizon. As Marleen Stikker pointed out in the closing discussion, it may take years before some of those means may actually materialize. Meanwhile, public budgets remain thin. Digital public infrastructure should be a policy goal across all democratic governments, backed by real money. That is still not a given.