There is an awful lot of work that needs to be done, and it is at the same time amazing that so much IS being done by so many people and communities around the globe, to increase our resilience, autonomy and sovereignty moving out of the tentacles of BigTech, and their authoritarian political partners.

With the #DemocraticTechFund we are setting in motion a collective process to bring together what is already there and to make the transition together. Making the transition, we are identifying use cases that need our collective support, to mobilise people and donations to bring them to fruition, to maturity.

We think this needs to be done together: by citizens and committed organisations, multiplied by public and private institutions.

Everyday people ask us where to start with their transition towards #digitalautonomy. And there is no easy answer, unfortunately. Well, the fundamental aspect with autonomy is that many people and communities are working it their way, addressing the specific needs of their community, and that is how it should be.

Lessons learnt by many of us on this field: co-create services that address those specific needs of the community, and build in democratic processes, through #commons governance and #cooperative membership where adequate, sharing knowledge internally and externally, connecting to other communities.

And there, I find my motivation: to connect the fragmented communities, coordinate efforts to build up better value propositions.

That is for me one of the key things to be contributing to the #DemocraticTechFund, to weave networks, to share transition strategies, to document what is missing, to put in motion campaigns to mobilise more people and resources to go together.

Given the #DigitalCoup and the urgency to transition to #DigitalAutonomy, we’re building up the https://DemocraticTech.Fund. It is a networked approach, aiming to increase our collective capacity, to discover the tech that is already available to us, to deploy it in ways that we can own it, to share learnings of the transition, to move there together, so we can overcome network effects.

It is our intention to identify together the gaps of what is needed to make the transition, to fund that collectively. This can be tech, media to raise awareness for the positive alternatives already out there, and federating our communities. We’re starting as civil society, and we intent to invite institutions – public and private – to chip in and multiply the contributions. Together we can make the impact that is needed.

#DemocraticTechFund #dtf