A collaborative effort
No single organisation can fix the internet alone. The problems are too many, too deep, too tangled. It will take a whole network of people and organisations, each working on a different part of the challenge.
dotPublic focuses on four things. Everything else, we develop in collaboration with partners. Here’s what we do:
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A new top level domain. A protected part of the internet you can only enter by meeting the standards, and only stay in by keeping to them. Not a badge you earn once, but a bar you clear every day. It's where universities, libraries, archives, museums, broadcasters, health services, government agencies, and civil society organisations can operate on ground built for them.
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The standards. Nine categories of good civic behaviour that any public-serving organisation should be able to promise, and keep. We write them, maintain them, and keep them current, so they face forwards instead of freezing in the moment they were written. Each one draws on experts who have spent their working lives in the field.
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A mark you can trust. Like the ‘CE Mark’, but for the internet. A site showing dotPublic accreditation is telling the world it meets the highest standards of good digital citizenship, independently verified, and checked again and again, not just once.
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Governance that can’t be captured. Answerable to its members and the public, proof against commercial or political pressure, and able to act when the standards are broken, quickly, fairly, and for real.
Everything else a healthy public internet needs beyond this, and it needs a great deal, we will pursue with partners: highlighting the challenges they have identified, helping to raise the funding their work needs, and integrating their tools into the shared framework our members will rely on.
Formal partners
The dotPublic Research Programme is based at Trinity College Dublin, which provides academic governance, oversight of the research methodology, and the publication of findings. The programme lives in the ADAPT Centre, under the principal investigation of Professor Dave Lewis. The university also acts as fiscal administrator for any grants that directly support the research programme.
Sense about Science, the independent charity, is dotPublic’s asset-locked body and the formal applicant for the new top level domain. It is also the programme’s partner institution, working with the research team to test the standards in practice and ensure the findings hold up to public and scientific scrutiny. Its director, Tracey Brown OBE, is a long-standing partner in the wider programme.
Project collaborations
Knowledge Futures
Knowledge Futures is the Massachusetts non-profit behind PubPub, the open publishing platform used by academic communities worldwide, and Underlay, a protocol for sharing structured knowledge. With Travis Rich and Gabriel Stein, we are developing Underlay.Project: a way of holding an institution's knowledge as structured, machine-readable records, so its authority travels with its work wherever that work goes, and a reader or an agent can tell a trusted source from an unknown one. It is the operational research behind dotPublic’s structured publishing standard, being proven now against twelve years of research from the ADAPT Centre.
The Webrecorder and Concordance Project
With Sam (Sj) Klein at the Concordance Project and Ilya Kreymer at Webrecorder, whose open tools are used by libraries, universities, and governments worldwide, we are building Archive.Project: long-term preservation as an ordinary condition of being a responsible institution, rather than a rescue attempted at the moment of loss. It works three ways: built into dotPublic membership, forward planning for any organisation that wants to secure its record while it is still healthy, and an archive of last resort for material in danger of vanishing. Its first pilot preserves the record of Sense about Science. See the working prototype
The Spritely Institute
With the Spritely Institute, led by Christine Lemmer-Webber, a co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, we are building Social.Project: a safe, pseudonymous space where the public can talk with the institutions that serve them, and with one another, maintaining integrity of communication without surveillance or technology gatekeepers. Conversations are end-to-end encrypted and built on Spritely's capability security model, so that access is something granted deliberately and can be revoked whenever appropriate, rather than a standing door anyone can watch. Privacy holds by default without sacrificing accountability. It is the operational research behind dotPublic’s safe-communication standard.
An open invitation
If your organisation shares these values and wants to help build a better internet, we would love to hear from you.
We are working in phases, and there are real opportunities to get involved now. You might pilot the standards in your own organisation, help shape a category where you have hard-won expertise, or back one of the projects on this page. Funders, public-serving organisations, and people who have simply thought hard about this all have a part to play.
It's never too early to start.
Please contact us to get in touch.