People’s Digital Goods and Infrastructure

Digital infrastructure intermediates a significant amount of human interactions, whether it’s human-human, human-organisation, or human-nation-state interactions. While Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) underpins most digital infrastructure globally, the infrastructure and technology itself is often opaquely governed and operated by large, powerful private and public entities, and is rarely accessible and accountable to the people, creating a massive power imbalance. With AI being incorporated into not just digital infrastructure, but the very fabric of society, systems become ever more opaque, especially when AI efficiency can naturally incentivise cutting humans out of the loop entirely.

Generative AI, in particular, has dramatically changed and disrupted the dynamics of technology creation, adoption, and usage. Instead of being at the mercy of those with the power to create technology, the problem-havers can now use AI to build solutions very specifically tailored to their needs, imbuing them with a certain level of agency and power that they never had. On the bright side, individuals and communities working to enshrine human rights, liberties, and positive social impact are now able to finally build some technology themselves rooted in ground realities, instead of being left with no tech capacity or being forced to adopt existing “BigTech” systems that are often indifferent to rights and freedoms, if not outright adverse to them.

Whereas the bureaucratic ideas of Digital Public Goods (DPG) and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) have enabled building large-scale systems for service delivery for a certain administratively manageable notion of the public over the internet, the world is headed to a future where “public” may not necessarily even be people, but AI systems and agents, acting on people’s behalf, or not. AI’s enabling of the creation of code and software artifacts at an unprecedented scale has both exciting and terrifying implications for society and the balance of power in general. An overarching framework for understanding, building, and governing technology that enshrines people and peoples’ rights and liberties at its centre, becomes crucial—a concept for Peoples’ Digital Goods and Infrastructure (PDGI). P before D. Without such a deliberately precise human and peoples’-centric framework, we risk moving from opaque and unaccountable “BigTech” systems to a tumultuous and dangerous future where such traits are exacerbated by the proliferation of AI systems, concentrating power further leaving the vast majority to be mere spectators, both as end users of technology and as citizens. As technologists who work at the intersection of FOSS and social impact, our attempts to frame and understand all of this have been to put the human at the centre. However, it is from observing non-tech organisations striving to preserve peoples’ rights at the grassroots, that we have found the appropriate framing—”peoples'”, where the idea of collective identity, rights, and liberties are embedded at the very core, rather than looking at this from the perspective of a mere human, a biological being in isolation pitted against the system.

What could PDGI as a concept entail? An evidence-based, forward-looking, normative framework of principles, standards, rights and obligations, and practices covering the entire spectrum of technology from conception, design, and creation to deployment and governance, applicable to all makers and deployers of technology. A framework that can inform hard structural requirements and legal standards in the future. The core principles for such a framework already exist scattered across the accumulated wisdom of many disciplines: rights and justice; decentralisation and federation; transparency and accountability; FOSS; humane technology; ethical technology; open-data; digital commons; digital privacy; platform cooperativism; algorithmic fairness; and many more. Not to mention the inviolable first-principles idea that no critical digital service on which a person’s life and wellbeing depends should exist without easily accessible non-digital alternatives. The mammoth work ahead is bringing together stakeholders from these diverse disciplines to meaningfully assimilate the best ideas into not just a rigorous framework, but a practical living handbook. Something that is grounded in the lived experiences and realities of those most affected by the digital divide and not just technologists and administrators. This is a call to embark on it.

– Kailash Nadh, Poruri Sai Rahul