Digital Commonwealth Project

The Digital Commonwealth Project (DCP) is developing a publicly accountable, community-designed digital system that harnesses our region’s emerging role in the digital economy. Begun in early 2022 at George Mason University’s Arlington campus, DCP unites leading technologists with local community groups, civic leaders, workers, business associations, and universities in a community-led design process that addresses local priorities while supporting resilient local business ecosystems and increasing community and employee ownership. At the project’s current stage, DCP is building technological capacity among individual coders, networks of technologists, and public institutions. 

DCP draws on the approaches of Community Wealth Building (CWB), platform cooperativism, and participatory planning. We envision that a critical mass of regional residents and organizations will use the DCP's technologies to build community wealth and democracy by (a) accessing local exchange and mutual aid, (b) enjoying the social provision of essential services (e.g. child care); (c) coordinating and directing financial, labor, and knowledge resources to invest in worker and community ownership; (d) actively participating in democracy (e.g. local government budgeting and planning); (e) collaborating on climate adaptation, mitigation and ecological restoration projects; and (f) supporting restitution and restorative justice programs.  

A global model for technology leadership 

With the growth of digital technology, advanced economies around the world have experienced seismic wealth gaps and rapid deindustrialization. While these trends draw unprecedented wealth to boom regions, in many communities, they also exacerbate existing socioeconomic and health inequalities and contribute to social and political polarization. Technologists in pioneering domains (e.g., spatial web, augmented reality, distributed ledger tecnology, and artificial intelligence) sometimes seek to address urgent global challenges like economic inequality but are often constrained by extractive business models in the technology sector. 

The Digital Commonwealth Project (DCP) provides an alternative model of responsible technology leadership. In Northern Virginia, which is rapidly becoming a globally-leading tech hub, we are currently experiencing a massive development boom alongside some of the steepest wealth inequality in the nation. Unlike projects that rely solely on venture capital or public funding, the DCP system channels development resources regionally (for example, through the expansion of worker-owned businesses and community-owned assets and enterprises). In doing so, the system generates, circulates, and retains value within our region, countering the draining of wealth from our communities by leading tech firms and global financial markets. By uniting the communities of our region in a commonly owned, universally accessible digital system, DCP is cultivating a model of technology leadership centered on the democratic norms of public accountability, personal liberty, and concern for the general welfare.