Concurrent Session 6: Public-Commons Partnership: Policies to Promote the Solidarity Stack

Second round of concurrent sessions

Format: Workshop

Speakers: Lingjun Wan, Matthew Brown (video), Watunyu Thanongsak

In this collaborative workshop, participants will envision and share both real-world examples and possible policy proposals for public-commons partnerships to enable the development, procurement, scaling, and support of the solidarity stack. Public resources at every scale, from neighborhoods and cities to states and national governments, are beginning to support parts of the solidarity stack. Participants are invited to bring the cases that inspire them most. Together, the group asks what policies we need to make Solidarity AI a reality.

Video (5 mins): Community Wealth in the Age of AI. A Message from Preston. Preston, a city in the north of England, is known around the world for the Preston Model, its approach to community wealth building. The city council spends public money locally and helps workers start businesses they own. In this short video, Councillor Matthew Brown, Leader of Preston City Council, shares where that work is heading: a cooperative for self-employed workers built with a trade union, plans to bring a driver-owned ride-hailing app to the UK, a worker-owned kitchen that trains young people, and a pub owned jointly by its community and its workers. He asks what a city can do as digital platforms give way to AI.

Lingjun Wan’s presentation, based on a paper co-authored with Sze Fung Ng and Sameer Kumar, examines how AI and data protection laws can overlook cooperative ownership and member governance. It proposes a layered legal approach that combines existing regulatory obligations with recognition of cooperative governance rights and tailored institutional mechanisms, reconciling individual rights, regulatory accountability, and meaningful member participation.

Watunyu Thanongsak, a science and technology innovation practitioner at the Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation, works on bringing research into practice with industry and the public sector.

Community notes

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