“Truth is humanity’s greatest obsession, and Wikipedians are the ones who dedicate themselves to pursuing it” - Anna Mazgal, at @publicspaces.net conference #pubconf2026

„So reform the system if you must, establish grants for creators, tax Big Tech developers up to the gills and give the money to creators; anything but the assumption that the traditional remuneration system has any hope of surviving” - @technollama.bsky.social on the #copyright AI singularity

How AI is breaking traditional remuneration models

It’s been a busy few weeks in the AI and copyright beat, and while I’ve been following all of the developments closely, I haven’t had the time to react to everything in the blog. …

technollama.co.uk

“Europe will need to do more than come up with new wrappings for the same chips” - good piece by @lionellaurent.bsky.social for Bloomberg on European AI sovereignty - and NVIDIA as the main beneficiary of this effort #publicAI www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Nvidia’s ‘Sovereign’ AI Could Win a Prize for Irony

The global scramble for chips risks entrenching new tech dependencies in Europe.

bloomberg.com

New piece from my co-director Zuza Warso. Good overview of EU’s current take on digital sovereignty and public infrastructures

Open Future@openfuture.bsky.social · last yr.

🇪🇺 The EU's new digital policies are ambitious—but without substantial investment in public infrastructure and alternatives to Big Tech, they will remain merely aspirational. Read Zuzanna Warso's analysis of recent EU digital policy developments: openfuture.eu/blog/europe-...

For the past few years, me, Kris at Naive and Matt at Reddit have been running the Tiny Awards, celebrating the good bits of the web. THEY ARE BACK IN 2025 AND NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN! Please tell your friends and share the link, as a small act of resistence to everything being shit: tinyawards.net

Tiny Awards

This is the home of the Tiny Awards, which, since 2023, has celebrated the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.

tinyawards.net

“Making for the web is easy, but most of us have forgotten how – ceding our digital agency to platforms and corporate landlords.” @kleinkleinklein.bsky.social + @sachajudd.com on building the Good Internet, out of the cozy web bits. Good stuff. zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/good-inter...

How to Build the Good Internet

Stepping out of the dark forest and reclaiming a social, handmade and cozy web

zine.kleinkleinklein.com

🤖 Join us May 20 for a discussion on Public AI. We will present a new white paper, commissioned by @bertelsmannst.bsky.social, with authors @felice.bsky.social and @alek.bsky.social, as well as industry experts. 📅 15:00 CEST | Free online event openfuture.eu/event/online...

“Europe Must Build: a Strategic Reset” by @nicolascolin.bsky.social, great piece that has faith in Europe’s tech capacity. Colin proposes “decentralized coordination” as mode of operations suited for EU’s diversity Useful for thinking about #publicAI in Europe. www.driftsignal.com/p/building-i...

Europe Must Build: A Strategic Reset

Drift Signal #253

driftsignal.com

The European Commission published the AI Continent Action Plan, with the aim of building a European approach that is innovative and competitive in the "race for leadership in AI". Here’s my analysis: ttps://openfuture.eu/blog/from-ai-factories-to-public-value/ #ai #publicAI #europe

From AI Factories to Public Value – Open Future

The AI Continent Action Plan needs a stronger vision of purposeful AI deployment if it wants to achieve more than just boost commercial AI development.

openfuture.eu

“Algo decision making systems are “leviathans”, harmful not for their arbitrariness or opacity, but systemacity of decisions" - @christinalu.bsky.social on need for plural #AI model ontologies (sounds technical, but has big consequences for human #commons) www.combinationsmag.com/model-plural...

Model Plurality

Current research in “plural alignment” concentrates on making AI models amenable to diverse human values. But plurality is not simply a safeguard against bias or an engine of efficiency: it’s a key in...

combinationsmag.com

Strong piece from @dacemoglumit.bsky.social on the AI opportunity - public interest AI will be built only if societies don't leave it just to the developers and engineers, and also - EU needs to build alternatives to the "Silicon Valley model" www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Will We Squander the AI Opportunity? | by Daron Acemoglu - Project Syndicate

Daron Acemoglu worries that the technology is on track to disempower, rather than complement, most of humanity.

project-syndicate.org

Good op-ed in NYT about the tech billionaries and companies they own, and how antithetical to democracy they are. good quotes from @himself.bsky.social who does some of the best thinking on this. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/o...

Opinion | It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It’s Not Democracy, Either (Gift Article)

How the federal government became “an outdated software system that must be replaced.”

nytimes.com

A proposal for how the UK National Data Library could function (from Feb, I'm catching up on #publicAI examples). Sounds a lot like #publicdatacommons. And a good example of a data-first pathway to more public AI (and other tech policy goals) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/tbi-ndl

Here's a pitch for what the National Data Library should actually be

Do you want to be a National Data Librarian?

takes.jamesomalley.co.uk

David Braue writes about the National Library of Australia, which began Terms of Use, limiting open access to its resources. Braue describes the context as "voracious genAI training algorithms overstay open government’s welcome". ia.acs.org.au/article/2025...

National Library cracks down on public data access

Archives are throttling access to data that was supposed to be open.

ia.acs.org.au

This Guardian piece looks at how Nordic countries, once at the forefront of digital payments, now see cash as a crucial mechanism for resilience. Social campaigns are encouraging people to pay with cash, at least once in a while. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

As cyberwarfare threat looms, cashless Nordic nations go back to banknotes | Miranda Bryant

Nordic countries were early adopters of digital payments. Now, electronic banking is seen as a potential threat to national security

theguardian.com

I've been working on a white paper on #publicAI policies and learned in the process that sound proposals are imposible without deep technical dive into the #AI stack. THis is a great NYT explainer on GPUs, data centers, energy and water use for AI. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

What DeepSeek? Big Tech Keeps Its A.I. Building Boom Alive.

An apparent breakthrough in efficiency from the Chinese start-up did not make tech’s biggest companies question their extravagant spending on new data centers.

nytimes.com

@communia.bsky.social analysis of the recent draft European research strategy 2025-2027. Good to see a strong commitment to #openscience. And an overall #publicinterest perspective - which is often missing from EU’s broader digital strategies communia-association.org/2025/03/10/e...

Proposal for the European Research Area Policy Agenda 2025-2027

At the end of February, the European Commission adopted its proposal for a Council Recommendation on the European Research Area (ERA) Policy Agenda for 2025 to 2027. COMMUNIA supports the Commission’s...

communia-association.org

New piece from my @jankrewer.bsky.social , my team member, on how EU should seek Exit from current digital challenges to #publicdigitalinfrastructure, in @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/looking-for-... #publicAI

Looking for an Exit: Europe’s Way to Public Digital Infrastructures | TechPolicy.Press

The EU must fund and govern digital commons as part of long-term public infrastructure to escape a cycle of dependency, writes Jan Krewer.

techpolicy.press

AI is meant to be destroying knowledge jobs, but at the moment, in the #US, it’s the state that’s destroying PhD jobs through funding cuts. The key question is then, how do the two trends intertwine? (And I guess it’s a #publicAI question) www.msn.com/en-ca/money/...

"as we build new social media, we need to keep in mind lessons learned from activist efforts to make corporate social media better" - @mallory.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy , at #rightscon panel on new social web. Fixing big platforms + alternatives is two pronged strategy for #digitalpublicspace

An amazing #opensourceAI story: Perplexity AI took the DeepSeek R1 model and de-censored it. the-decoder.com/perplexity-a...

Perplexity AI removes Chinese censorship from Deepseek R1

Perplexity AI has unveiled R1 1776, a modified version of the Deepseek-R1 language model specifically designed to overcome Chinese censorship through specialized post-training techniques.

the-decoder.com

Looking forward to #RightsCon, and seeing how ideas about #AI as public infrastructure resonate with people who focus on #digitalrights.

Open Future@openfuture.bsky.social · 2y ago

🤖 Join us at @rightscon.org next Tuesday (Jan 25, 10:15 CST–Taiwan time) to explore #PublicAI. @bertelsmannst.bsky.social hosts this session where experts from Taiwan AI Academy, Open Future, and Thomson Reuters will discuss pathways to democratizing AI. www.rightscon.org #RightsCon2025

@alek.bsky.social will present research on #OpenSourceAI by @opensource.org and Open Future—featuring insights from #DataGovernance experts—examining how #OpenAI can prioritize public access over private commodification. 📙 openfuture.eu/publication/...

🇪🇺 The #EuroStack report proposes €300B for EU tech sovereignty through chips, AI, and cloud infrastructure. Read @jankrewer.bsky.social's analysis: openfuture.eu/blog/eurosta...

“the future lies in institutional reform – in rebuilding the public institutions that have been “eaten” by the profit-driven platforms” – Mike Pepi talks #publicdigitalinfrastructure in Dazed piece on #platform alternatives (with rare mainstream / pop tone www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture...

Social media is in a death spiral – so what comes next?

It’s clear that X, Instagram and TikTok are broken, but the problem runs deeper than any single platform. Is it possible to build something better?

dazeddigital.com

DOGE is accessing vast troves of data, shutting down gov websites, and promising to replace countless jobs with an "AI-first" strategy. There's a reason Musk is aiming to automate the government—it's all about concentrating power and exercising control. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/government...

Government by Grok

How and why Elon Musk is trying to automate the federal government

bloodinthemachine.com

Update from WIRED head @katie-drummond.bsky.social. We're hosting a webinar for subscribers w/ our reporters and editors next Thursday, Feb 13 @ 1pm ET.

Every 4 years, a team of libraries & research organizations work together to preserve material from U.S. government websites during the transition of administrations. 🗳️ Get the latest on the 2024/2025 End of Term Web Archive @eotarchive.org ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/02/06/u...

@wikipedia.org is vital for #NLP, yet little research contributes back to the Wikimedia community. To bridge this gap, we are organizing #WikiNLP to advance both. w/ Isaac Johnson (@wikimediafoundation.org) @akhilarora.bsky.social @frimelle.bsky.social @tiziano.bsky.social @indiiigo.bsky.social

NLP for Wikipedia workshop (at ACL 2025)@wikinlp.bsky.social · 2y ago

The call for papers for the second edition of the #WikiNLP workshop at @aclmeeting.bsky.social is out! We welcome contributions on #NLProc + Wikimedia, especially on datasets, and ideas to advance its mission. More details: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NLP_for...