Our living dashboard of all Plural Stack initiatives.
Rebuilding our digital foundations from protocol up. Our founding report, and the intellectual backbone of everything else here.
A scoring framework for measuring how open, fair, and accountable a digital protocol or platform really is.
We dont own the Plural Stack, we help grow it. Plural protocol ecosystems are already working in the wild, idependently of our initiative.
Their success is indicative of our ambition.
Thousands of independent developers building on shared, permissionless infrastructure.
One open specification, many independent implementations.
Decentralised storage networks with no single point of failure.
Civic technology that puts deliberation directly into policymaking.
If you're researching, designing, or building, open, decentralised, non-extractive digital infrastructure, we want to hear about it.
Four critical areas where plural protocol ecosystems we think should be prioritised
The plumbing of digital government.
Foundational public protocols and infrastructure that governments and institutions can adopt or mandate - from digital identity to shared data spaces.
AI as local infrastructure
Decentralised, community-governed AI infrastructure - from local models to agentic AI that stays accountable to the people it serves.
Instead of systems built for infinite scale from a single point of control, plural AI means hyper-local guardian intelligences bound to the communities they serve - open models, resource caps, and explicit non-expansion pacts as design requirements of trustworthy AI.
Multiple models trained on diverse datasets, operating within interoperable protocols, preserve the cognitive diversity that healthy democracies depend on - and turn Europe's languages, regional cultures and dense civil society from a coordination problem into irreplaceable training substrate.
Democratic governance by design
Civic technology and digital democracy tools that let citizens participate directly in governance and deliberation.
Taiwan's digital democracy - g0v, vTaiwan, Pol.is - shows how open-source collaboration and structured deliberation integrate citizens directly into policymaking, improving responsiveness while reducing capture by state or commercial actors.
Tools like quadratic voting, conviction voting and bridging-based ranking enable nuanced preference expression; AI-assisted deliberation at continental scale can feed legislative processes as a verifiable, auditable extension of democratic decision-making.
Protocols over platform
Open social protocols as an alternative to closed, algorithm-controlled platforms.
Open specifications with many independent implementations - as the AT Protocol demonstrates - mean no single operator can capture the network. Users and communities keep their identity, data and social graph when they leave, forcing services to compete on quality of care rather than lock-in.
User agency over the algorithms replaces opaque, attention-extracting curation: instead of a feed that ranks - and quietly buries - content on the platform's terms, open protocols let users and communities inspect, choose, swap or build the ranking algorithms that shape what they see. Social provenance adds transparency through active labeling, showing which communities embrace or contest a piece of content.