Rights and Values

Digitalisation must comply with fundamental rights: freedom of information and communication, privacy, and orderly rules for social and commercial traffic. Here we deviate from the Public Stack: it's not enough for us that fundamental rights are complied with — what matters is values embedded directly in the technology itself. Technology is not neutral in its values and the way it organises people.

The Public Stack addresses a broad set of values, but stays largely agnostic about who implements them and how — it doesn't much mind whether a commercial vendor or a technocracy is the one running the stack, as long as the values are formally addressed. We think that weakens its premise: values that can be satisfied by a technocracy as easily as by a self-organised movement aren't doing much work. In fact, they might be missing the fundamental point.

Values

We do not wish to be neutral. We pick a side, and we aren't afraid of the conflict that comes with it. For a public stack to actually work, you need to have values and follow them — they're not something to be afraid of. These are the ones we pick:

Freedom — the freedom to self-organise, free of dominance and resisting the formation of hierarchy: data portability, and interfaces and infrastructure that are easy to duplicate and make your own — you don't need to sacrifice your own identity and interests to get there.

Equality — the equal right to be a resident, a maker, or a steward, whichever you choose, and the real ability to do so. That equality is built through learning and capacity building.

Democracy — we choose to organise based on consensus, not majority rule imposed from above. That forces a very different technological model to arrive there — built for smaller collectives that arrive at choices through deliberation, not for casting a vote.

Solidarity — what drives mutual aid and creates the communities in which life can happen, including within technology. Built through trust: usability, accessibility, and a bit of delight.

Community — we value relationships that build movements, both local and global, but resist the individualist cosmopolitanism that technology so easily causes. A global network of atomised users is not a community.

Progress — the sense of progress that comes from taking action and building something together: the idea that a better future can be imagined and created together, technology among the ways to do it.

Sustainability — we're in this for the long run, and aim to serve life, so progress has to be balanced with subsistence. That means being precise with infrastructural resources, avoiding tokenmaxxing, and running efficient software.

Rights

Rights imbue these values into rules, just as requirements are imbued into designs and code — in a sense, rights and code are doing the same thing: encoding what's supposed to happen into a system that then enforces it, whether that system is a legal code or a codebase. Algorithms are a more complex, dynamic version of the same move, and AI more dynamic still. Which means the same question applies to both: who sets the rules, and why?

The union has a complicated relation to rights and code alike. They do not exist in a vacuum — they are contested, unevenly enforced, and can be wielded against the people they are supposed to protect. Property rights and freedom of contract have historically been used to limit the right to strike. In housing, the same asymmetry shows up as code: large databases that optimise for property values and rents have been built, like StiVAD — for landlords and investors, not tenants. The state that guarantees rights is also the state that has, in many cases, sided with capital when rights came into conflict.

This means the union cannot simply trust that rights and code will protect it. It has to build the conditions under which those rights can actually be exercised — which includes controlling its own infrastructure, keeping its communications out of reach of hostile third parties, and not depending on platforms whose interests are not aligned with its members. Concretely, that means every technology we use gets its licence and rights evaluated — see Legal for how.

Opportunities

These values and rights aren't only problems to solve — they're opportunities too. By participating in them, we propagate them, perhaps even virally:

• Values-aligned choices — the providers, the software, and the legal terms we operate under all have to align with what we stand for. The data itself, how it's modelled, and the interfaces through which it's created and used to communicate all shape how we organise — there are many design assumptions and values baked into that.
• A legal match, not just FOSS — the licence has to fit too, not just the code. Microsoft famously called copyleft a virus, because it spreads: use AGPL-licensed code in your product and your product inherits the same freedoms. We love that about it — it's exactly the mechanism that keeps the commons from being enclosed. See Legal for how we evaluate licences.

Security and Protocols & Standards cover the rest: how privacy and data minimisation get built in, and why federation matters.