JamiiAfrica

Are Africa’s power grids ready for the AI data centre boom?

African countries should plan for the AI economy by developing power and digital systems together, and treating data centres as strategic infrastructure.

Data Streaming for AI: From Extractive Training to Sovereign Infrastructure DWeb Camp 2026

AI systems are consuming the world's content without compensating its creators. This session explores data streaming as a new paradigm — where content flows to AI in real time, with built-in rights management, usage tracking, and fair compensation — and asks what it would take to make this infrastructure decentralized, sovereign, and governed by the communities it serves.

Strengthening AI Foundations: Emerging Opportunities for Developing Countries

The World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025 explores how AI is accelerating growth in developing countries, while highlighting persistent gaps in access, infrastructure, and skills. Discover key trends, challenges, and the ‘Four Cs’ needed to strengthen AI foundations globally.

Interoperable Sovereignty: The Democratic Alternative to Digital Authoritarianism

A Democratic Architecture for the Digital Age Digital sovereignty has become a central concern for governments worldwide, yet its meaning remains contested. Too often it is framed as...

Digital Democracy in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations

Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are institutional technologies that enable democratic governance innovation. They inherit key democratic principles such as procedural transparency and immutable records from being based on blockchain technology. This paper conducts a systematic literature review to examine governance mechanisms and challenges of digital democracy in DAOs. While issues like power concentration and coordination failures exist in current implementations, we argue that the concept of DAOs offers new opportunities for transparent governance and participatory decision-making. As testbeds for governance experiments, we find that DAOs have the potential to reshape democratic processes and foster innovative governance models in the digital era. Calling for interdisciplinary collaboration, further research is needed around Sybil-resistant voting mechanisms, ideological path dependencies and deliberation mechanisms.

EU-AI | Igor L.

The geopolitical landscape is shifting from physical borders to digital infrastructure. Here is a factual breakdown of how a $500 billion investment in "Sovereign AI" is changing global power dynamics. The Shift: From Land to "Substrate" Historically, a nation’s power was defined by its territory and legal systems (the Westphalian model). Today, power is increasingly tied to the compute substrate—the physical hardware and energy required to run AI. 1. Infrastructural Enclosure The "Sovereign Compute Coalition" (SCC) represents a massive consolidation of power. Major private entities are acquiring the three pillars of modern national strength: * Hardware: High-end AI chips (e.g., Nvidia). * Energy: The massive power grids needed to fuel them. * Data Centers: The physical "brains" of the digital economy. 2. The Rise of Technocracy As private companies own these essential tools, governments may find themselves in a position where they effectively "rent" their ability to govern. This moves decision-making power away from elected officials and toward those who control AI infrastructure. 3. Europe’s Strategic Response Europe is launching several initiatives to avoid becoming a "client state" of foreign tech providers. The strategy focuses on four main channels: * 8ra Initiative: Building a decentralized, multi-provider cloud-edge architecture to ensure data remains under European control and interoperable across borders. * ReArm Europe: A strategic defense package (presented in March 2025) aimed at boosting industrial competitiveness and reducing strategic dependencies in technology and defense. * Sovereign LLMs: Developing domestic models, such as Mistral, that are designed to align with European data privacy standards and cultural values. * Energy & Procurement: Using public procurement and new regulatory frameworks to create demand for homegrown, sustainable energy-efficient compute solutions. The goal of these moves is #DigitalSovereignty : the ability for a region to control its own digital destiny without relying exclusively on transnational monopolies. Data tells the real story. Are you following it? Follow #datanomics

Funding Open Source for Digital Sovereignty

"Open Source alone won't deliver digital sovereignty. Europe must fix procurement and fund those who actually build it."

Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution

The potential for catastrophic effects from the AI boom demands robust deliberation and real democratic governance. Localized initiatives like data center moratoria won't get us there.

Democratic digital infrastructure for civil society · Theta

How civil society and Danish foundations can support digital democracy

Digital Sovereignty: A Framework to improve digital readiness of the Government of Canada

The Government of Canada (GC) must be able to manage and protect its data, systems and infrastructure to operate securely and independently in a globally connected environment. This paper explains what digital sovereignty means for the GC and how it informs the management of government digital operations. Broader issues such as Canada’s economic, industrial, or national security interests are out of scope of this paper.

The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices

This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones.

Data-owning Democracy or Digital Socialism?

This article contrasts two reform proposals articulated in recent debates about how to democratize the digital economy: data-owning democracy and digital socialism. A data-owning democracy is a political-economic regime character-ized by the

HUGE — AI Without Giving Up Your Privacy

We're building an Agentic AI Platform running on your Device that lives with YOU, isolated from the cloud, fundamentally reimagining the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence through ownership, privacy, and massive context. In an age of capture and control, HUGE sells independence and sovereignty.

Decentralization: Worth The Wait — Open Tech Strategies | Blog

Ethan Zuckerman has a piece in Wired that says building decentralization tools is a sucker's bet. He and his coauthors, Chelsea Barabas and Neha Narula, mention the FreedomBox, which I helped lead, as an example of how difficult this stuff is. They point to a list of things that make decentralized efforts prone to failure and conclude:

From Chile to the Philippines, meet the people pushing back on AI

Individuals and communities are resisting the demands and practices of Big Tech's AI infrastructure — such as data centers and digital labor — due to their environmental and social costs.