Finally, the open-access conceptual article I co-authored with Bastiaan van Loenen The Data Republic: Fostering a Sustainable, Inclusive and Resilient Digital Transformation for the European Union is out in Frontiers in Political Science. This article is a follow-up on a previous one we co-authored (here), which set the scene for the Data Republic as a model coupling open data, spatial data infrastructures, and data commons. In this second article, we further strengthen our argument backing it with new evidence and a renewed emphasis on overcoming the normative positivist limits of data governance.

Abstract. In various official documents, the European Union has declared its goal to pursue a “people-centric” digital transformation. While fuzzy in its formulation, this generally entails the defense of individual rights alongside principles such as economic competitiveness, social inclusiveness, digital sovereignty, and environmental sustainability. Hence—we claim—“people-centric” embeds and demands a “collectual” (collective + individual) equilibrium between individual and collective rights and principles. Concretely, we draw on literature to operationalize such an equilibrium in terms of socio-economic sustainability, inclusiveness, and resilience (SIR). From here, we show that the EU’s current human rights-based approach (HRBA) and its emerging digital single market (DSM) maintain an individualistic focus and economic rationale which fail to be collectual and SIR. We identify data commons as a promising collectual and SIR regime for governing the digital transformation. By addressing current barriers and limitations of data common initiatives, we conceptualize the Data Republic as a theoretical setup that can systemically tackle these limitations and barriers to provide a new way for pursuing a “people-centric” digital transformation in the EU.

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Despite (or maybe because) this article has had a long gestation and publication history, we feel it makes a strong contribution in complementing the EU digital strategy’s current focus on fundamental human rights with a systemic attention to the collective dimension and effects of data-driven technologies and services.

Being conceptual in nature, the republic governance we envision does warrant further testing and validation in real-life settings across scales and contexts, ideally starting from the city as a locus of convergence of tech innovators, public policymakers, research institutions, non-institutional actors, and citizens’ activism.

To do so, on the one hand, we identify the main barriers such a model shall tackle (among others, technical, legal, and socio-institutional), and, on the other hand, we outline the “how”, that is, a transdisciplinary approach to move toward the realization of the Data Republic.

The article, which aligns to works on digital public infrastructures and eurostack model, can be of interest to anyone researching data governance, open data ecosystems, data commons, EU data spaces, city planning. Most importantly, the robust philosophical framing of the Data Republic epitomises the extent to which the nexus governance-digital ecology needs philosophy more than ever – especially at the intersection of political theory and value theory – if we want to shape the design of data-driven technologies and services in the public interest.