Format: Reverse Panel 7
Moderator: Hal Plotkin
Speakers: Recep Erdem Cansızoğlu, Sandra Moreno, Akkanut Wantanasombut, Uygar Özesmi, Robin Puga
What does sovereignty mean when data, compute, models, infrastructure, identity, and governance are controlled at different layers of the stack? At a moment when President Donald Trump has argued that the only AI “guardrail” needed is a strong and smart president, this panel asks what the alternative looks like: governance distributed across institutions, communities, infrastructures, and democratic forms of accountability rather than concentrated in a single executive authority.
Uygar Özesmi observes that as the hegemonic economic system collapses, narratives, practices, and prefigurative organizations are emerging in a pluriverse of next economies around the world. Yet even these are exploited by AI systems owned by a few transnational powers. He asks how the next economies can avoid extraction and create sympoiesis, and which roads and initiatives can build community-owned AI systems across them. He sees the next economies as a place to build community-owned AI systems, a conversation that continues at the Next Economies Forum in Cairo in April 2027.
Recep Erdem Cansızoğlu notes that the pluriverse has found ways to organize alternatives to extractive systems. To move forward together, the next economies ecosystem needs digital infrastructure alongside physical infrastructure. He asks how communities can build AI systems they actually own. He grounds the Solidarity Stack in the wider pluriverse of next-economy alternatives, arguing that community ownership of AI infrastructure is part of a long struggle to build non-extractive systems.
Robin Puga brings the case of CanTrust Hosting Co-operative, asking what cooperative hosting can contribute to digital sovereignty and community-owned AI infrastructure. His contribution grounds the Solidarity Stack at the hosting layer, where ownership and governance of the infrastructure itself become part of the question.
Reporter 1: Akkanut Wantanasombut
Reporter 2: Mallory Knodel
Speakers
-
Robin Puga Producer and Co-host of Each For All: The Co-operative Connection
-
Akkanut Wantanasombut Head of the ISSIE Research Group at Chulalongkorn University
-
Recep Erdem Cansızoğlu Co-Lead Next Economies Forum
-
Sandra Moreno Cadena Executive Secretary of RIPESS
-
Hal Plotkin Senior Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
-
Uygar Özesmi Founder & Instigator of Good4Trust.org