Building digital spaces in the public interest - Where we are and how to move forward - session at MozFest

MozFest, the online festival organised by the Mozilla foundation takes place from 7-11 March 2022. It is a festival to connect with others around the world who have a single mission: a better, healthier internet.

During this festival SDEPS partners Waag & PublicSpaces will organise a session together with the City of Amsterdam on Building digital spaces in the public interest.

That the big social media and communication platforms cause big societal problems is nothing new. One major underlying issue is that all big social media platforms are operated by commercial companies. There are currently no alternative platforms that operate at scale AND put the public interest truly at their core. However, there are many initiatives that operate on a smaller scale that do provide an alternative platform or a piece of the solution for preserving people’s rights online. One such example could be to provide a privacy-preserving way of logging in or adopting an established open standard such as ActivityPub to allow people to control their own data.

This session serves to showcase some projects that work on (pieces of) such digital public spaces. It will also provide ample opportunity to hear from you what other projects are valuable in this regard and aims to build new connections so we can move forward more coherently and more powerfully towards building these spaces in the public interest.

The session will be held online at Friday 11th of March 4 - 5.30 pm CET and get your (free) tickets here.