Discover the concepts that guide our actions: digital sovereignty, open education, and technology for the common good.
Digital Sovereignty
It is the power of a community or country to control its own digital destiny, instead of depending on external technologies and influence. We currently critically depend on foreign platforms that we only realize our lack of sovereignty when they stop working. One just has to remember when WhatsApp stopped functioning for brief periods and its impact on our daily routines.
Think about a country’s sovereignty: it’s the right to create its own laws and decide its own future. Digital sovereignty applies this idea to the world of digital technology. It’s not just about having a fast internet connection; it’s about having control and autonomy over the data, infrastructure (servers, networks), and software that underpin digital life.
This means being able to understand how technologies work, develop them, and regulate them in accordance with local and/or institutional values and laws. Without this capacity, a country becomes vulnerable to decisions made by foreign companies or governments, which can affect everything from citizens’ privacy to the security and continuity of essential public services.
Why does this matter for the common good? Because digital sovereignty ensures that technology serves local collective interests, involving public and private actors guided by public interests, not external influence. It protects sensitive data (such as health and safety data) and allows the community to build technological solutions that truly meet its needs.
Open Education
It is a historic movement that updates the principles of progressive education in digital culture, promoting equity, inclusion, and quality through open and collaborative pedagogical practices, with the freedom to create, use, combine, modify, and redistribute educational resources. It adopts open technologies and formats, prioritizing free software, and defends digital rights, including access to information, freedom of expression, and privacy ( Open Education Pocket Guide ).
Open education goes beyond offering free courses. It is based on the idea that knowledge should be a shared good. At the heart of this practice are Open Educational Resources ( OER ): teaching, learning, and research materials (texts, videos, games, etc.) that are in the public domain or under open licenses.Why does this matter for the common good? Because it democratizes access to quality education, encourages collaboration and participation, and fosters pedagogical innovation. Education is reaffirmed as a human right enabled through collective action involving educators and students in which technology becomes central: not merely a tool.
Technologies for the Common Good
These are technologies guided by public values and social purpose, aimed at solving real problems and promoting inclusion, sustainability, and improving the lives of all people. For school-age children, the principle of the ‘best interests’ of children and adolescents is highlighted, which requires comprehensive protection throughout the entire cycle of development, application, and governance of technologies.This is a collective construction, a process in which communities, public authorities, companies, social organizations, researchers, educators, and students participate in decisions about conception, development, governance, and use. This means creating and sustaining socio-technical arrangements that prioritize the public interest, articulating technology with ethics, public policies, and social sciences. It should promote inclusion, democratization of access to services, environmental sustainability, and the strengthening of democracy. It is an approach that seeks to reduce inequalities and use the power of digital innovation to create a more just and sustainable future.
Reference Material
- The Education Under Surveillance Observatory contains updated data on the relationship between public higher education institutions and education departments with big tech companies in Brazil and around the world;
- Descriptive analysis reports of the Terms of Use and Privacy Policies of Google and Microsoft education packages ( EATBC Chair and Alana, 2020 );
- Analysis highlighting the widespread non-compliance with the LGPD (Brazilian General Data Protection Law) and the transfer of responsibility to schools ( EATBC Chair; Lapin, 2022 );
- Studies by the Education Under Surveillance Observatory , which since 2020 has been mapping the outsourcing of email servers from public universities to big tech companies, with a strong predominance of Google and Microsoft ( Latin America + Africa report , analysis of state contracts );
- A collection of three studies led by CGI advisor Rafael Evangelista on the platformization of public education;
- Recent investigations into cases of facial biometrics in classrooms in Paraná (Carolina Israel and Rodrigo Firmino); Internetlab and in São Paulo (REPU);
- Mapping of public procurement of AI applications carried out by Edutecia.