Why a Public Stack
Most software today is delivered as a managed service: a vendor runs the infrastructure, handles the updates, and charges per seat. Convenient, but control, data ownership, and long-term flexibility all sit with the vendor, not with you. For a democratic organisation that's not a minor trade-off, it's a fundamental one: an organisation built on collective ownership and self-organisation ends up renting its own infrastructure back from a vendor whose interests aren't its members'. Now imagine the alternative — infrastructure the organisation actually owns, shaped by the people who use it and accountable to nobody but its own members: technology as democratic as the movement running it.
Comparison
| Managed (SaaS) | Self-hosted | FOSS | Custom-built | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | Instant | Requires configuration | Requires configuration | Requires development |
| Maintenance | Vendor handles it | You handle it | You handle it | You handle it, alone |
| Cost | Per-seat subscription | Infrastructure + licence fees | Infrastructure only | AI/development time + infrastructure |
| Data | On vendor's servers | On your own server | On your own server | On your own server |
| Control | Limited to what vendor allows | Full (software terms apply) | Full | Full |
| Lock-in | High | Medium | None — can fork and modify | High — only you understand the code |
| Auditability | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ Source is public | ✗ unless deliberately opened |
In short
Self-hosting FOSS software, documented under a Public Stack framework, gives a democratic organisation the same thing it tries to build everywhere else: collective control over the conditions members depend on, rather than dependency on someone else's terms.
- Values alignment — the tools, providers, and decisions can reflect what the organisation stands for: sovereignty over data, environmental sustainability, transparency, and privacy.
- Cost — infrastructure is paid for, not per-seat subscriptions. For an organisation with many occasional users, a flat cost beats punishing per-seat pricing.
- Freedom — data is yours, formats are open, and the organisation can shape its tools and information into something that actually fits it, rather than adapting itself to what a vendor provides.
- Capability — maintaining your own infrastructure builds real skills, spread across the people who do it, not concentrated in a vendor's support team.
- Memory — writing down why these choices were made means the reasoning outlives any one contributor.
- Common ownership — choosing FOSS over closed custom code, even when AI makes the latter easy, keeps the effort feeding a shared commons instead of a private one.