Sarra Hedhli
Sarra Hedhli is a product manager for educational digital commons at the French Ministry of Education, where she supports the development and scaling of digital products built as digital commons. Previously, she worked on European education policy, helping define France's positions during negotiations at the Council of the European Union. She contributed to the inclusion of the first European definition of digital commons in Council Recommendations on digital education and digital skills. Drawing on experience in both public policy and digital product management, her work focuses on how governments can enable sustainable digital commons through product thinking, collaborative governance, and public support mechanisms.
Session
Governments across Europe are looking for alternatives to their growing dependence on global technology platforms. Yet digital sovereignty is not only about software—it is also about enabling communities to build, maintain and govern shared digital resources.
In education, this potential already exists. Nearly one million French teachers use, create, adapt, document and share educational resources alongside developers, researchers, public institutions and companies. The challenge is no longer to generate innovation, but to transform this collective capacity into sustainable digital commons.
The French Ministry of Education is addressing this challenge through a national "Forge" for Educational Digital Commons. Rather than developing educational software itself, the Ministry provides shared infrastructure, documentation, community facilitation and governance, while supporting projects that follow a commons trajectory.
This session will present the Forge ecosystem, its scale and first results: 10,000+ hosted projects, 500 curated educational resources, and several commons reaching millions of monthly uses. Through projects such as MathALÉA, PrimTux, Code en Bois and Marelle, we will illustrate how existing initiatives evolve into sustainable educational digital commons.
The Forge is part of the French Ministry of Education's broader national strategy for digital education. The Ministry complements its role as a provider of digital services by acting as an ecosystem steward: operating shared infrastructure, supporting the EduCommuns programme—which helps promising educational digital commons become robust, community-governed and sustainable—and co-designing a governance model that will make the Forge itself a "commons of commons".
Beyond education, this session explores how public administrations can strengthen digital sovereignty by cultivating ecosystems rather than owning digital products, and how this model could inspire collaboration across Europe.