What does a healthy digital infrastructure look like and how can communities know whether they are truly in control of the technologies they depend on?
In this playful, hands-on workshop, participants become “digital infrastructure doctors” and work in small groups to diagnose fictional community cases: a local archive dependent on a proprietary cloud service, a rural community relying on a single communication platform, or an organisation whose essential services depend on a specific software ecosystem.
Participants first map what their community needs to preserve, share and organise, then identify the hidden dependencies behind its existing digital infrastructure. They consider questions of vendor lock-in, data portability, interoperability, device and software choice, governance and long-term maintenance.
They then develop a “treatment plan”: redesigning the infrastructure using open source, open standards, interoperability, decentralised or self-hosted approaches and cooperative governance. Importantly, groups must also consider what happens after deployment: who maintains the infrastructure, who controls administrative access, what happens when people leave, and whether the community can migrate or change provider.
The workshop concludes with each group creating a digital infrastructure prescription: 5–7 principles for a healthy infrastructure and one concrete initiative that could put one of those principles into practice.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for assessing digital dependencies and a set of questions they can apply when evaluating or designing open-source and decentralised solutions for their own organisations and communities.