The PC3 is called Eco-commons: “Understanding, building and managing sustainable digital commons”.
The Eco-Commons priority project covers all commons related to digital technologies: digital commons (intangible, non-rival), digital equipment managed as a common and electric and electronic waste, considered as negative commons. The objective of the project is to assess the direct and indirect, positive and negative environmental impact of these commons. The singularity of the project comes from the fact that a common—defined by a resource, a community and a governance model—must be studied via the interactions between the technologies and organizations that shape it. The project thus includes several collaborations with well-identified communities, including OpenStreetMap France and the French Collectif des Hébergeurs Alternatifs, Transparents, Ouverts, Neutres et Solidaires. It is also balanced in terms of disciplines, its members are half computer scientists, half from other disciplines (design, social sciences and humanities).
The project has four work packages, defined through several dichotomies (common vs. public/private resource, tangible vs. intangible resource, data vs. software) :
- Hardware infrastructure of data commons
- Free and open-source software for sustainable digital technologies
- The impact of digital commons on (self-)organizations
- Digital hardware as commons
Leaders: Victor Charpenay (Mines Saint-Etienne – IMT), Clément Marquet (Mines Paris – PSL), Aurélien Tabard (Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon 1), Laurent Lefèvre (Inria)