At Common Ground, we are working towards pooling open-source tools for the community-led governance of commons and landscapes, and building the shared infrastructure needed for tools, data and knowledge systems to talk to each other.
Building this requires several systems to work together. Existing public datasets need to be made accessible and interpretable by the communities who live within these landscapes. The knowledge and data that already reside within communities need to become part of how these systems understand the landscape, alongside the more formal, technical understanding built through mapping and monitoring. The knowledge and data collected and created by the various NGOs working in this space also need to be integrated into these systems. At the same time, the interests of communities have to be protected: their rights over their own data, and their ability to govern the systems built around it, cannot be an afterthought.
Building this kind of shared and open infrastructure is complex. It requires us to agree, early on, on some fundamental design principles.
To help guide this path, we partnered with Aapti Institute to map the approaches that already exist globally for public interest technology. We are grateful for the collaboration with Aapti Institute on this report and multiple Common Ground partners and experts who provided their valuable time and perspectives.
In their report titled “Reclaiming Digital Infrastructure for the Commons: Community Participation and Data Governance”, Aapti looks across digital public infrastructure, free and open-source software, and data cooperatives and collectives. Looking at best practices, challenges and opportunities of each approach, based on global precedents and examples.
There are many important insights in the report for anyone looking at creating digital infrastructures for scale:
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No single governance model, digital public infrastructure, open-source, or data stewardship institutions is sufficient on its own. Each addresses a different part of the problem, and each has a blind spot the others can help correct.
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Control over data needs to be understood as collective, not only individual. In Commons governance, the risks and benefits of data use are shared across the community, and individual consent alone does not account for this.
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Governance cannot be framed outside the technical system as a separate layer. It needs to be embedded within the infrastructure itself, through access controls, consent mechanisms and licensing that put local rules into effect.
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Scale should be pursued through federation rather than uniformity. Shared standards can coexist with local variation, allowing systems to grow without imposing a single model on every context.
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Intermediary institutions, particularly CSOs, play a continuing role in translating between community priorities, technical design and policy. This work needs sustained support rather than being treated as a one-time transition step.
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Initial systems should be designed for the lowest common denominator: offline-first, mobile-first, and limited to a small number of essential data points. Additional functionality should only be added once trust and value have been demonstrated.
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Governance authority should shift deliberately over time, from centralised coordination in the early stages to more distributed, community-anchored authority as capacity develops. Community representation needs to be built in from the outset, not added later.
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Every stakeholder in the system — communities, CSOs, vendors, government functionaries — needs a genuine and non-extractive reason to participate. Sustainability depends on this being true for all parties, not only the initiative’s funders.
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Legitimacy should be established through small, well-chosen pilots before any attempt to scale, with success measured by sustained use and trust rather than by reach or adoption numbers alone.
What we are learning is that this path has to be built one step at a time, guided by a clear set of design principles, and by the critical questions we will need to keep asking ourselves as we design digital systems meant to serve rural communities. While there are not always clear answers already available, the questions themselves are important to be asked.
Link to full report: https://commongroundinitiative.in/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Aapti-x-Common-Ground-Report_Final-18-Aug-2026-compressed.pdf