Today, in Ottawa on April 24, 2025, a group of individuals gathered to discuss a pressing concern: creating a healthier digital environment. We’ve all felt the change in social media. As it went from a chronological timeline, where we could get to the end to an algorithm that was designed to keep us clicking so we would view more ads. We know that something is broken, technology no longer serves us, we serve it. We know that we want to change things, but what can we do about it?

The meeting mixed in various perspectives from development, hosting, entrepreneurship, business models, funding, end-user engagement. We also considered how we would approach tackling these issues. We rejected the notion of developing a solution in isolation and shipping it at the end, hoping people find it useful. We don’t even know that we’re talking about the right problems, or if our solutions are feasible for the everyday digital citizen.

One common thread emerged: we need to empower digital citizens to own their software and data. Software literacy is crucial for technology governance. If people can understand – and even write – their own software, they’re less likely to be misled by bad actors.

Below, I’ve highlighted a few key threads that emerged.

Re-imagine the internet as a digital commons

Currently, we can see the perverse nature of large technology companies exploiting our data. They have been stockpiling billions of data points on what we eat, who we sleep with, what health issues ail us and more. Understandably, we’re re-examining data ownership. Why should a company own information about what food I am eating? If they need access, to provide insights, they can ask me. If they want access to train their AI models, they can pay me. I believe, this explores a part of the equation – consent for data can’t be given if we don’t own our data in the first place.

There is more to this discussion, let’s broaden our lenses. What if the health data for a city was publicly owned? Health officials could observe the change in calories consumed when the price of rice increases. They could make focused educational materials to help us to eat nutrient-rich food and save money. In our conversation, the concept of roads came up a few times.

Roads are expensive, and we don’t personally use every road we help fund. So why don’t we private the roads? It can be more valuable for the public to fund and own the roads, without trying to capture profit. This sounds counter-intuitive, but let me explain. If we all had to pay a fee to a different company each time we went from Montreal road onto the Queensway and then another tax to get onto Aviation Parkway, or a different one to go to Gatineau, it would be annoying and inefficient. More importantly, you would make it more difficult for people to drive to businesses to purchase goods and services. A business with a warehouse in Kanata and a storefront at St. Laurent mall knows that it will be able to use the public roads to move goods, engage customers and allow its employees to come to work. We’re all richer, because no one tries to capture the smaller profit.

In the case of the digital commons, there isn’t a significant difference. A road is infrastructure for communication: of people and goods. The internet is composed of digital roads which allow us to communicate ideas, application data and software. Now, the idea of a digital commons is starting to come together.

Consider, if every business and citizen were empowered to access information, share information and create applications. There would be more commerce, there would be more knowledge in each person and there would be more applications which solved a wider array of problems for more people.

Closing Thoughts

If you think the internet is destined to be controlled by large technology firms who don’t care about you, have hope. This is not the vision the internet was designed upon, and it is not the vision which will be enabled within the coming months and years. We are currently living in a bit of a dark ages for the internet and personal computers. Having lived in darkness, our ideas have been sparked. You can fuel this spark as we embark on a new era of the internet.

If you are interested please reach out to me [email protected]. I am very excited to learn about your ideas and how we can work together to bring them to life.