Digital Commons on the EU’s Digital Sovereignty Agenda

As discussions around digital sovereignty in the EU mature, Digital Commons are emerging as a visible part of that agenda. They appeared not only on the main stage of the Franco-German Summit on European Digital Sovereignty last week but were also included in the final declaration, which lists them among “the seven strategic and promising areas to unlock EU’s competitiveness and build EU’s digital sovereignty.”

Later in the week, this momentum carried into Brussels, where the NGI Commons consortium in collaboration with the European Commission hosted the Digital Commons Policy Summit. Commission representatives were clear: the issue is no longer whether Digital Commons fit into Europe’s digital agenda, but how to put this into practice.

The discussions at the policy summit showed that expectations are increasingly centred on the newly established Digital Commons EDIC as the institutional vehicle capable of coordinating Member State efforts, scaling proven commons-based models and providing long-term stewardship for Europe’s shared digital resources.

Speakers stressed that the DC EDIC matters precisely because many Digital Commons lack a stable governance home, and because coordination is essential for uptake. They also stressed that the DC EDIC must demonstrate early successes in order to attract additional countries (and funding) and consolidate a European approach to shared infrastructure.

This inevitably brings the debate back to a challenge familiar to many Digital Commons projects: sustainability. There is now a clear recognition that Europe must invest in public digital infrastructure, including the Digital Commons, in a way that reflects their strategic importance and operational realities.

In this context, the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF), proposed in the context of the MFF negotiation as the EU’s flagship instrument for competitiveness and sovereignty, was mentioned as a key framework. Its ambition to provide “a single investment journey from research to deployment” aligns closely with what commons-based infrastructure requires: stable, multi-year support rather than fragmented, project-based grants. Importantly, the current ECF draft already references EDICs as potential vehicles for delivering Europe’s digital leadership agenda, but this connection remains underdeveloped. If the DC-EDIC is to fulfil its mandate, the ECF should explicitly recognise Digital Commons as part of Europe’s strategic infrastructure and provide the level of financial continuity required to maintain and operate them over time.

The ECF framework also acknowledges that different challenges call for different types of investment, and this applies equally to the Digital Commons ecosystem. There is no single model for supporting Digital Commons. Some projects, such as foundational open-source software components or non-profit community-driven systems, may require stable grants for maintenance, security and governance. But as providers and representatives of European industry often emphasise, many do not need subsidies; they need customers.

This is where the conversation naturally shifts to public procurement. At the Digital Commons Policy Summit, this point surfaced repeatedly: strategic public procurement can create the demand necessary for commons-based solutions to scale, strengthen their viability and compete with entrenched proprietary systems. Yet procurement is also a matter of coordination. Public authorities need clear guidance and consistent ways to assess whether solutions are reliable, well-supported and capable of integrating into public-sector environments. Without this support, procurement processes tend to revert to familiar proprietary solutions, locking public bodies into systems that undermine Europe’s long-term sovereignty goals.

As the DC-EDIC takes shape, the ECF opens a pathway for investment, and procurement gains recognition as a strategic lever, a coordinated EU approach to sustaining Digital Commons is finally within reach.