Andy Piper – Building the Open Alternative: DPGs for Digital Sovereignty #FOSSBack

This talk explores the concept of digital public goods and digital sovereignty, emphasizing the importance of open-source technologies in promoting knowledge accessibility and supporting UN sustainable development goals. The speaker, currently at Mastodon, highlights historical examples such as the Great Library of Alexandria to illustrate the ongoing struggle for knowledge distribution in the digital age. He discusses various regulatory frameworks like GDPR and the Digital Markets Act that aim to enhance data control for users, particularly in Europe. The talk also focuses on Mastodon as a digital public good, showcasing its federated model which allows users to run their own servers, thus promoting data sovereignty and resisting the problems associated with big tech. Finally, the speaker emphasizes the need for sustainable ecosystems around digital public goods to support underrepresented and marginalized communities.

Well, hello everybody. Um, I'm really happy to be here at Fossback Stage. It's an event that I followed online remotely uh in the past and it's a really great pleasure to be here in person. So, quick self intro. This is myself. Um I'm fortunate to be working at Masttodon right now, but it's important to explain that this talk and this title was uh submitted for force backstage

with our friends from the digital public goods alliance. Um unfortunately Leia Gimple uh who was my co-submitter was not able to be here. So you get me flying solo. um I will try to represent their content but please don't expect me to be the absolute expert on all things uh DPGs. Um and I also do a p bunch of open source things. I I've been uh working

uh for nearly 30 years as I've heard other people today speak about this on stage as and probably made my first commit in the in the late 90s as well to an open source project. And I had an at the time a colleague at IBM where I worked who was the distinguished engineer and he described himself at that time as a technology optimist. It's important to distinguish

that between that and the techno optimist manifesto nonsense that came out uh sometime last year. I do try to be an optimist though. I'm in technology to work with other people to build cool stuff and make life better uh for humans. Um I studied history as my university degree. So, uh, and I'm selftaught in tech, so I really care about, uh, the the people and society elements

that we work on. And I'm going to start off with a short historical diversion for you. Um, bit of a a rewind in history. In the 3rd century BC, the uh, the Great Library at Alexandria was built. uh and it wasn't the only library at the time but the uh it was a really large collection of knowledge and the uh the rulers of Alexandria at the time

uh wanted to hoard and control that knowledge. Some ancient writers claimed that as ships came into the dock um if they were searched for scrolls and if any were found they were taken to the library and copies were sent back to to the ship. And I think of this in the context of what's going on today with the large language models sometimes and the behavior of AI

companies. Uh consider the concentration of knowledge in data and digital compute power primarily but not exclusively on the west coast of the USA. And of course you know you might even think of the people that were going to crawl the decks to find those scrolls uh and desperately saying please don't come on our ship. want to leave uh in the context of LLMs and and AI as

well. But libraries spread from there. I contend that libraries and uh sources of knowledge are good for humanity. My wife is uh has a degree, one of her many degrees is in library science, and I have a ton of respect for folks who work to make knowledge more accessible for everyone. You're all sitting there thinking, I came to a talk about digital public goods. What is he

on about? Well, let's fast forward a couple of thousand uh years, few revolutions of technology and of course there was a load of information and some clever people figured out how to make it a bit more accessible. And back in the early 2000s, my nieces were five or six years old and I couldn't remember something. So, they said, "Uncle Andrew, ask Google cuz Google knows everything." which

triggered my geek brain to then want to explain how the internet worked to a 5-year-old, which didn't turn out so well. But I the point of this historical diversion at the beginning is to say that I love the web. I love the internet. I think it's one of the greatest things that mankind has ever created. And we sit here, people are watching this online. We communicate daily

in real time with people on the other side of the planet. This is incredible. And I just want us all to stop for a moment and appreciate that we humans together collaboratively created this. We are amazing. You are amazing. And spoiler alert, this talk is about So we need to do some definitions. and digital sovereignty has been mentioned a few times. Does anybody have a like a

clicker for how many times the words have been used this morning already. Uh so I'm not going to go into tons of detail on defining digital sovereignty. But of course we know that since the start of the current American administration, this notion has been a bit of a buzz term particularly here in Europe but elsewhere as well. And of course, if you've been paying attention, it's been

ongoing since well before uh the beginning of last year. The obvious attempts to obvious examples being the GDPR uh to enable the European uh citizens to to have uh greater control of their data uh the DMA, digital markets act, the digital services act. We'll come back to some of the regulatory frameworks in a moment, but I put some other words on the slide as well because whilst

there are definitions and and organizations that that define the term digital sovereignty, the word sovereignty can sometimes be a little bit isolationist. Now, I'm a gentleman who's come here from an island just off the west coast of France. Um, so I may not be the best person to be commenting on this, but I think we really should think about uh giving ourselves the agency and autonomy to

make better choices. Um, when we think about digital sovereignty, we don't want to cut ourselves off and be islands. So that's digital sovereignty. I've only heard the term digital public goods mentioned a couple of times so far today, both in conversation and in talks. Digital public goods. The DPG Alliance defines it as a software data, AI model, standards or content that adheres to the open definition that

do no harm and that help attain the UN sustainable development goals. Sounds good. We built open source software. All of our stuff's that, right? We we don't want to do harm. there's a certification process to go through here. Um, and having gone through that process to confirm that your software, your product, uh, conforms to to those standards, privacy requirements and other global standards, then you can land

in the DPG alliances registry. Uh, the registry at the moment has more than 220 digital public goods. We've heard the names of some of them on stage this morning, this morning. We'll have some more mentioned in some other talks this afternoon. Um, and around 50 of those actually joined the registry last year, which I think is really exciting and also a good demonstration of the momentum in

this space. Now, I said we'd come back to the regulatory framework. I imagine that most people at this event will have paid more attention than many to some of the legislation and other things that have been going on. But quite often I found especially in the UK to be honest if I go to an event and talk about EU legislation or regulatory not so much attention has

been paid which is a bit frustrating but as we know there's been a significant shift towards unlocking these cages that the big tech platforms have built around themselves or the moes as the VCs like to call them. So, we've had the GDPR, the DMA, the DSA, the Interoperable Europe Act, which is not one that gets quite so much attention. Um, there was a post last week with

uh one of the European agencies having sent out a word document um for uh some kind of comment and one of the free software organizations saying, "Excuse me, uh you should be using open do format uh instead." So the interoperable Europe act mandates that public services across the EU must be interoperable by default. So the government's agencies should be legally nudged towards choosing uh open standards and

it fits within that public money public code philosophy. While we're mentioning money, uh if we're going to identify and support digital public goods, then we need to be building sustainable ecosystems around them. I'll come on to this in the context of Masttodon uh later on. In the Europe, of course, we've got helpful programs like NGI and NLNET. In Germany, the sovereign tech agency we've heard from today

as well. Uh but we really need to think about not just building the software, but then maintaining it and supporting and sustaining the communities around them as well. Crucially, the DPG uh alliance is not just about building a catalog of things to enable the EU to compete with the EU US. In fact, uh not at all. Um it's a it's a UN uh backed program. And it's

also not just about big tech. The African Union has uh a digital transformation strategy uh for 2020 to 2030 which also has clear goals to safeguard uh Africa's data sovereignty in particular. If we look at the value of DPGs, we can see that they provide a number of benefits. Um that word sovereignty again um cost effectiveness which is always an interesting one when it comes to talking

about open source and whether it's really cheaper and so on. But one of the things I want to or two of the things I really want to call out on this uh chart are the notion of transparency of the code leading to greater ability to audit what you're running uh safety and security. Uh and then also that customization and inclusivity because with open source software of course

we potentially have the capability to to u deeply customize it and that can enable solutions to be tailored to groups that are traditionally excluded from digital experiences. Additionally, we can share lessons between uh deploying software in different places to enable u those underrepresented and marginalized groups uh to be better supported. Their digital the country's digital public infrastructure can be more inclusive. I was at an event uh

a few weekends ago in Wales where uh they have a an app for a Maston server which is specifically targeting uh people in Wales and they their app by default out of the box presents Welsh and English uh for example as uh as language choices. So I've just hinted at the gear change. Uh we're going to talk we've talked about the policy elements. We've talked about digital

public goods. Let's talk about a practical example of a DPG. I mentioned in 2025 there are around 50 new digital public goods added to the the registry in in June. Mastedon was one of those and we're incredibly proud of that. And you may think, well, anybody can download Mastedon. What's the big deal? Why is this a why is this a thing? Well, it's because it enables us

to say first of all, someone has independently looked at our project and our software and certified it as qualifying for the digital public good definition, but also it enables organizations to invest in and make use of that software with more confidence. Does anyone in the room not know what Masterdon is? it. I will just briefly mention it because of course we the the talk will be online

and and as well. I was really of course delighted to see a fetty wall as I walked in the entrance of the event this morning. It's free and open source software for running social networks. My preference is not to refer to it as social media. This is a very much a personal thing. I feel like social media it's becomes a very consumerfocused thing. It's it's what you

consume like television or something like that. What I prefer to think of it of is social networks because we want to connect to people actual humans and uh comment and discuss. So Macedon's federated that means that anybody can run a server connect to those on others and connect more broadly than that as well which we'll talk about. We also have the cutest mascot. Um just putting that

out Uh right. So we're at a transition to a new phase. We're going from being this hacker project that Eugene Rokco created to something much more than that. Um we are relatively small in terms of social networks and software that that's out there. But we think it's really important to think about how we grow and sustain uh the platform. And we spent a couple of years growing

an engineering team, some of whom are here in in in Berlin, which is really nice. I should be meeting them this evening. Uh and adding other roles, including mine. I'm currently head of communications that are important in managing these non-technical elements of the project. And in case you missed the news, at the beginning of last year, we posted a blog post about our intention to change the

organization. Um, around the end of last year, we actually made some changes to the leadership team. So, we now have an executive director, technical director, and community director who are leading the project. And we strongly believe that this is too important to be owned by a single person or a corporation. Uh this is why we are very firmly non-commercial. Uh we don't want uh advertising uh all

of those unhealthy things that can lead to um much more uh problematic technology which we'll also mention in a moment. So as part of that transition, as part of actually building out this team, once we suddenly had a bunch of people in a in a shared uh space together, we wanted to talk really about what our mission and our vision were. So we tal talked about this

as well at Fosdom earlier in the year. Um and I think our mission really fits well into this DPG story. uh it's about connecting the world and enabling thriving online communities and it really fits well with that digital public infrastructure uh idea and I said humans are what this talk is all about uh to from my perspective uh it absolutely is and I want to be clear

that Masteron is a project built by humans for humans we care about the people that use the platform form. We're incredibly grateful to everybody who participates uh and we care about the communities that form around them and our new community director Hannah um spoke about this at Fosam in terms of opening up uh to uh a greater uh community elements in our governance in the future as

well. We want to build a social web that really serves the common good and that is inclusive and welcoming to everyone. But Masteron is not the Fettiverse. Uh Masteron is part of a broader ecosystem. And again, we've heard this uh today already from other speakers. We're not trying to be an island. We recognize that we are part of a a wider What is a Fediverse? For those

that are not aware, it's a set of platforms and software that interoperate using shared protocols. W3 standard called activity pub is is the key one there. And incidentally, another DPG that was added to the registry last year is peer tube um which is developed primarily out of France um a federated video hosting platform that interoperates with Masttodon and other Fedverse platforms. I think Masteron is is a

excellent example to use when we talk about how DPGs can support uh digital sovereignty. And we've already done a bit of time travel in this talk. Uh this is a bit more recent. Uh back in 2024, I wrote this blog post. My previous job to the one I'm in today, for those of you that that uh don't know me, is I worked for a company that no

longer exists called Twitter. and it was a nice place. Um, in 2022 it was bought by the world's richest 12-year-old. Uh, he changed its name and uh invited the worst humans to set up the home there and then started himself attacking uh politicians um and public servants around the around the world. But in particular uh there was a moment in time where he was doing that to

some British politicians, female ones. Gosh, wouldn't have seen that coming. And uh it led me to write this blog post because I recognized at the time that uh suddenly having all of these governments on a platform that they absolutely had no control of was a bit challenging. Um, so I really believe that if you're a government agency, uh, civic agency, publisher, you really should be owning, uh,

the, uh, the platform that you're, uh, publishing on. Otherwise, when they fall into the hands of bad actors, uh, you find yourself in an impossible position. Why be at the mercy of a platform that can weaponize its own algorithm against you? So we've really moved away from this idea of a global town square, a single global town square, a single global to a more federated and decentralized

model that allows a government uh or a small community to run your own services, own your own data, but remain connected crucially to the world and to anybody that wants to be connected with you. can dilute that platform risk. Um if one node fails or the rules change uh it doesn't mean that the whole network collapses. Masteron at the moment is uh pretty strong around some of

elements of customization. Uh you'll see some more coming in the future, but uh it really is as I mentioned with the example in Wales. Uh there's another one in uh Canada in in Quebec. Uh it really does enable you to customize and uh support your national, regional, local community. So in terms of sustainability and what we're doing at Masttodon, one of the things that we are doing

is we've started to offer some hosting and uh we're helping organizations start their own servers if they want to. So specifically the EU Commission, uh the state of Shezwick Holstein here in Germany, uh Blais the city in France as well as others. If they want a quick way to get started, then we could help them ourselves. But really importantly, whilst we do host those, we want other

organizations to also run their own because just one organization hosting a bunch of Masttodon servers in one set of data centers is not very resilient. Um, so it' be great if other organizations can can run their own as well and we'll provide some support services to those if they want to. So why would those public institutions move to Masteron and the Fediverse? Well, it's about that direct

connection. It's about avoiding the algorithm disintermediating their posts. Uh it's about avoiding uh the commercial middleman harvesting citizens data. Um and to some extent there's this public money, public code element, but we still see that that needs to go further. Um and as I mentioned that example uh last week or or two weeks ago where not all of the organizations immediately uh choose the open and interoperable

uh options. I'm not the only person writing about this and just this is right up to date. This was a thing I was frantically adding to my slides this morning because my friend Elellanena Eleanor Rini uh her one of her master one of her Fedverse addresses is here posted just this morning. I got an email from her ghost newsletter uh on a similar topic. It's it's a

longer read. It's more up to date than the the uh blog post that I wrote a couple of years ago. Um and Elellanena is just such an incredible person to follow. Uh she's non-technical. Uh she's actually a filmmaker. Uh but she's really passionate about promoting the use of open source and also the Fedverse. Totally total coincidence that went live this morning, but it was really exciting to

see that. So something I regret to inform you while I talk about how exciting Masttodon is and how we've reorganized and we've got this bigger engineering team and we've got new things happening. uh we have not completely cracked sustainable funding and I'm sure many of you in the room who work on open source projects have not completely dissimilar challenges. Whilst we receive a lot of interest from

public institutions, uh it doesn't mean everybody is wanting us to host them or that they are themselves donating to open source projects like ours or the ones that we depend on. We are very very grateful for the grants that we have received. We've received a number from uh NGI uh programs uh to date and others. Our ambition would be that we are much more strongly supported by

user donations. We have a very clear uh notion that we do not want any kind of individual influence based on outsized donations. clearly we want to think about how to fund our project and our team uh without going to some of those uh more problematic routes. Advertising is is off the table for example and that's that's fine. Uh but we need to think about the the broader

funding uh of the pro program. And it's not just about funding a bunch of people to write the software and build pretty user interfaces and add features. It is also about things like sending me here. I'm later in the week going over to Brussels to have some more conversations there as well. And as we know, we're at FOS backstage. there are a lot of these less visible

elements to the either the user community or the developer community to what we do together to make our project successful. I am really excited mentioning the fact that we've expanded the team. Um I don't know how many of you are staying uh for Wednesday uh for backstage design. Um, but our designer, our UX, uh, lead, Imani, is going to be speaking and I've had a sneak peek

at her, uh, script. Uh, and it looks really, really great. I'm going to miss it because I'll be on a a flight to Brussels at the time. U,, but you'll learn a lot about the importance there and the the ways in which we're thinking about profession professionalgrade user experience. Now, um, it really is a a step change in the way that Masteron is being developed. All right,

this is where we're going to wrap though. Um, I want to talk about very briefly just just sort of flip through these these things when we're talking about digital We need to be thinking about that interoperability. We need to actually be talking with the the digital public goods alliance. I mean I'm not here uh myself as them but uh I'm really uh proud to collaborate with them

um to uh and also to work with other projects in the portfolio that they have in the registry. So we need to think about how we're going to continue to fund EPGs. There isn't a single answer to that uh and ensure that our governments uh think about interoperability. And that is my talk today. Thank you. Uh thanks for that talk. Um how do you how do you

convince public institutions to use um the Fediverse rather than big tech where the the argument from the sort of big wigs at the top is that the public is on YouTube, the public is on Facebook, they're on X. Why why would they publish to the Fediverse rather than where the public already is? How how do you uh convince people? >> Great question. Um so essentially I see

an audience over there. Why should I come over here? People are already over there. First of all, I would say that if you are specifically, and this is me bashing X, but if you are specifically thinking you have an audience on X, then the numbers that you see are fictional. Um, most of those are almost certainly bots and not real people. Um, that is my ex bashing

done. it's a great question. There's a gentleman called uh uh uh Ralph Stockman who's uh here in Berlin. uh it works uh for the libraries here who's uh come up with this plus one concept. So if you're going to be posting on these proprietary commercial platforms and you're a public institution funded by public money then you should be using one of those platforms. So that's the public

uh public money public uh code uh argument. Elellanena's blog post that I uh showed a screenshot of there um has also got a bunch of stuff around the topics you just raised around where your audience is and where you think your audiences. Uh our experience and my experience with Masteron or the Fediverse is that actually I get a lot more engagement on those platforms uh than I

do elsewhere because there is so much noise on other platforms uh compared to Signal. Um there is also an element of yes if you build it they will come but if you don't come then you won't see the people also coming to to to to participate. I I was at at Twitter for a long time and this is an absolutely obvious you know um counterpoint to everybody

should be on the fediverse. We don't have metrics. Uh we are, you know, private by we we take user privacy more seriously than other platforms do. Therefore, we're not tracking who's clicking. We're not giving you all the information and all the nice pretty charts about how engaged uh your you think your audience is. So, it is a hard cell. In Masttodon, we've done a few things recently,

for example, with uh posting links. Now depending on how your server is configured uh people can start to see traffic from Masteron servers coming back to uh news articles and so on. So so that can help a little bit. Um but um yeah, it's a hard sell. Um and it's a frustrating cell because in a time of money not being as cheap as it was, uh people

are optimizing for what they think is the, you know, the cheapest way to get the biggest audience, uh rather than necessarily living up to their own values of wanting to engage with those audiences. One of the interesting things I find with working with um some of the organizations that push for dem you know more participatory dem democracy is that they take it very ser take this very

seriously um but a lot of uh governments sadly seem to think that it's all a media game which it that's a very big element of it let's be honest um but I think the plus one approach of saying okay you're posting on these other things but you really need to be engaging with this other community who may not be in those places at all and then see

that grow out um can be quite powerful. Sorry, that was a long answer. >> That was a good answer. Thank you. >> All right, folks. Unfortunately, we ran out of time. Thank you, Andy.