Bio
Tara Merk is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at CNRS/Panthéon-Assas University Paris II, studying ‘Exit to Community’ strategies for collective digital economy ownership. Her interdisciplinary research, supervised by Primavera de Filippi and Ellie Rennie, addresses governance, trust-building, and digital solidarity economies.
As a 2025/2026 Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE), Tara researches cooperative data centers as an alternative to corporate-owned infrastructure, focusing on their scalability, governance challenges, and role in supporting cooperative AI. Her work examines historical case studies, such as GAD eG in Germany, to assess the viability of cooperative models in critical industries like financial services.
She actively contributes to The Metagovernance Project, developing frameworks facilitating open-source community governance transitions. Previously, Tara collaborated with institutions such as the Weizenbaum Institute, IOTA Foundation, and Other Internet, focusing on blockchain governance and digital ethnography.