Manifesto of the Swiss Digital Commons Association

Fostering and Maintaining Autonomous Digital Commons

The Swiss Digital Commons Association exists to promote and foster autonomous, decentralized, and transparent digital infrastructure as Swiss digital commons. The association acts as a guardian, coordinator, and framework of trust — not as an owner, operator, or commercial intermediary of the infrastructure it fosters.

Many initiatives combine buzzwords such as decentralized, open source, community, sovereign, or federated — yet organizationally they often end up as a company, with centralized hosting, proprietary services, or hidden control. The Swiss Digital Commons Association is structured to consistently align:

infrastructure,
governance,
licensing model,
trust,
and operations.

Three Guiding Principles

1. Autonomy of the Infrastructure

The association does not follow the principle “the association owns the network”, but rather:

The association protects principles and coordination, but the infrastructure lives autonomously through its participants.

This places the association’s work in the tradition of:

internet principles,
federated systems,
free networks,
digital commons.

The association acts as a guardian, coordinator, and framework of trust — never as a platform owner.

2. Transparency as the Basis for Trust

The association replaces brand trust, corporate trust, and “trust us” models with verifiable openness.

For the association, OSI-approved copyleft licenses with strong network-use provisions are used as transparency licenses — chosen to force the full disclosure of every member’s contributions to the fostered infrastructure. The GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3), used for the first fostered project, binds every node operator to make the complete corresponding source code of their node software — including all modifications — available to the users of the service. Running a node is therefore not a private act but a public, verifiable contribution.

This turns the license itself into the trust mechanism: federated infrastructure becomes verifiable from the outside, and trust is created without a central authority.

3. Separation of Authors and Governance

The association deliberately separates:

intellectual property,
infrastructure,
governance,
operations.

This separation prevents typical open-source pitfalls — such as a foundation taking over everything, the community losing its influence, later IP conflicts arising, or silent commercialization setting in. The result is an ecosystem rather than a product.

Fostered Projects

The principles of this manifesto take concrete form in the projects the association fosters — described on the projects page. Further projects embodying these principles may be adopted as fostered projects by resolution of the General Assembly.

Positioning

The association does not aim to build “the next GitHub” or any other commercial platform. It aims to enable:

verifiable, autonomous, and community-supported digital infrastructure.

In the European context, this may prove more relevant in the long term than VC-funded forge or platform projects.

Challenges

The central challenges lie not in technology, but in:

long-term governance,
conflict resolution,
trust between node operators,
security standards,
and the prevention of informal power centers.

Even decentralized systems often develop:

social centralization,
maintainer elites,
infrastructure dependencies.

That is why the focus on transparency, disclosure, autonomous nodes, and a non-profit purpose is not a matter of style but a structural necessity.

The work of the Swiss Digital Commons Association stands in a tradition together with:

early internet ideals,
free networks,
cooperative models,
Fediverse principles,
commons governance.

Combined with a modern governance and compliance concept that incorporates Swiss quality and origin standards.