Why I’m supporting the Digital Life Collective

Today, the Digital Life Collective is seeking cofounding members — the first 150 people who will kickstart a co-operative movement to build tech we trust.

I’m both a cofounding member, and I’m stepping up to be one of the directors of the initial UK-based co-operative which is a necessary piece of the support.

Why am I doing this? I’m keen to see a future where we have ethical, responsible technology which works for everyone. To reach this, we need new ways to build this technology, new models which are sustainable and can offer secure, resilient systems. The Digital Life Collective stands a good chance of doing this, and is setting out in a sensible direction.

The Collective community already has folks who aren’t from technical backgrounds, which is important — we need marketing and community and legal expertise too, and we have those involved. We’ll need to be more than a haven for geeks building for geeks, partly because we’ll need to be able to scale up to be effective (and so we need to attract a really large membership community), and partly because governance matters as much as technology. And a variety of expertise, experiences and knowhow is needed to inform good governance.

We’re also not focussed on one specific technology or product or service. There are many good projects setting out to do niche things — but the overhead of finding and setting up sustainable models, incorporation, governance etc is quite high, and so the Digital Life Collective is a potential umbrella to support these. I’m particularly interested to see if this might be a way to support good open source ‘infrastructure’ projects, things that are less ‘shiny’ and immediately valuable to an individual than apps, but which are essential for a fair and trustworthy internet. We need to be maintaining such projects, not just creating them, and that takes significant work.

It’s an ambitious attempt to do something different, and to create a foundation for future technologies which serve people worldwide. Who knows whether it can succeed — and we’ll undoubtedly make mistakes along the way. Still, it’s worth a try, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the Collective becomes, and supports. You can become a member now: check the prospectus at diglife.com.