Free and open-source licenses are the standard way to make software a digital common good. A digital common good might be governed in various ways depending on the political awareness of the authors. The power to commit changes to the code is usually held by a few hands. Changing the governance is hard: the energy cost to maintain and develop the forked software acts as a barrier to change.
We propose a social technology to secure the democratic governance of a digital common.
A Democratic Common is a common governed in a democratic way through a constitution. The constitution itself is a common good. The constitution guarantees the sovereignty of the community over the common. The constitution protects the fundamental rights and freedoms of the members of the community. Democratic common governance is based on the rule of law, like any democracy: everything is authorized unless a rule states otherwise. The organization of the common is structured by roles and circles created and destroyed dynamically according to the needs of the common. The common decision process is a battle-field tested governance process, involving the collective intelligence of stakeholders to produce the rules of the common.
Babel.coop is a democratic common run by the Babel.coop Constitution, which has been successfully used for a few years in our community. The Babel.coop Constitution will be released into the public domain.