dotPublic Standards

The organisations that provide the information and services you rely on should hold themselves to a clear set of civic standards – the things you would expect from anyone acting in your name.

You should be able to feel confident that organisations won't track you. That they will tell you who runs them and who pays for them. That the information will still be available years from now. And that, if the information changes, they will tell you what has changed.

We are developing a set of technical and behavioural standards – the dotPublic Standards – which we have grouped into five categories, each one focused on a different aspect of what it means to act in the public's interest.

The five commitments

1. Privacy. We will wait for your consent, collect only what we need, keep it no longer than necessary, and protect what we learn about you and your family, sharing it only with your agreement.
2. Universality. We will remove barriers to safe and equal access, whatever someone’s income, ability, personal situation, or use of technology.
3. Transparency. We will be open about our funding, decisions, partners, suppliers, use of AI, and every change we make or undergo, and keep what we publish traceable to its source, wherever it goes
4. Accountability. We will answer to the people we serve for what we do, publish, and put at risk, respond to every challenge, and openly correct what we get wrong.
5. Stewardship. We will hold everything in our care in trust for the people we serve, the planet, and those who follow, keep it authentic and verifiable, and maintain the means to protect, preserve, and hand it on.

Testing the dotPublic Standards

We are testing the dotPublic Standards through our research collaboration with Trinity College Dublin. The dotPublic research programme is based at the ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin – one of Europe's leading research centres for digital media and AI.

Through the research programme we will be investigating, within several partner organisations:

• to what extent organisations already meet these standards
• what would be required to bring the rest of their work into compliance with the standards
• what additional resources or capacity that work would call for
• tools that could reduce that effort as far as possible
• whether the people who use a service notice the changes and come to value them
• whether a commitment made freely holds over the years, or quietly loosens
• whether the standards need to be enforced through a top-level domain.

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