A network of public sector organisations in The Netherlands is working together to make the Internet a better place. Public broadcasters, cultural heritage, governmental organisations, healthcare, and educational networks try via the non-profit organisation PublicSpaces to clean up their use of internet communication technologies and help each other.
It started in 2018 when the Dutch broadcast company VPRO realised they were forcing their audience to use communication platforms against their public mission and values.
The founder of PublicSpaces, Geert-Jan Bogaerts, also the leader of innovation and digital media at VPRO, wrote the foundation’s Manifesto for a healthier Internet.
“In 2018, Geert-Jan realised that the station’s use of Instagram, YouTube and other similar tools that manipulate the users was in contradiction with the station’s mission,” explains Wouter Tebbens, who was the director of the non-profit organisation PublicSpaces until the end of 2023 and is still affiliated.
The mission of PublicSpaces sounds like the following: We’re ‘committed to providing an alternative software ecosystem based on public values. Those values are articulated in the PublicSpaces Manifesto and endorsed by the entire coalition. The Manifesto entails the following values:
- Open – as in open source with equal access for everybody and independent from political, governmental, and commercial influence.
- Transparent – as fully accessible and reviewable
- Accountable – with verified users and not holding any personal data of its users
- Sovereign – where users are not the product and it is about the empowerment of the users who have full control of their personal data, content, and interactions
- User-Centric – design with privacy by design principles and no dark patterns
The principles are very similar to the data ethics principles developed by DataEthics.eu and link to the digital sovereignty aspirations of the European Union.
The partners – other public companies and organisations – committed to going through a digital power wash to live up to the above principles.
They developed the so-called Digital Powerwash, a tool to help organisations clean up their part of the internet.“It is a self-assessment method and organisations get a score. How good and how bad are the tools you use as organisation to communicate with the public. Nobody is perfect,” says Wouter Tebbens. “If they live up to a certain level, they get a badge for their website. It is not a certification. Just a badge; it signals the organisation’s commitment to transition to a healthier internet.”
Open Source-based Tools
PublicSpaces itself is also walking the talk by using alternative tools to big tech’s and it runs a yearly conference. Here are some of the open source-based tools they are using:
- BigBlueBotton as video conference instead of Zoom and Teams.
- LibreOffice in stead of Microsoft Office
- Element.io for chat
- Mastodon and PeerTube instead of X/Twitter and Youtube
- Nextcloud instead of Google Docs
- Odoo with a vast choice of business apps e.g. accounting, subscription, helpdesk, CRM.
Wouter Tebbens acknowledges that it is hard getting free of Microsoft or Google, and that Microsoft is not making interoperability to other systems easy.
“As a public sector, there are legal and ethical issues using Microsoft or Google as they are not open source nor provide strong guarantees to privacy. And it is a very bad idea only to buy from one vendor.”
This is especially problematic when a whole country and most of the government or schools depend on one or two Big Tech vendors. When asked what to do and how to get out, he said:
“We need courageous politicians, who can set goals, e.g. to reach 30% use of open software in the public sector within x years. They could put targets up for civil servants to work towards this goal and then in the long run we can be even more ambitious toward the goal of digital sovereignty.”
Photo: publicspaces.net