The World Wide Web has transformed our lives. It helps us connect, learn, organise, and imagine together. But it can also be toxic, dangerous, extractive, and harmful, concentrating power, enabling abuse, consuming huge amounts of energy, and leaving many voices unheard.
So what if we didn’t just accept the internet as it is?
What if we built a new one, starting in Dundee?
DD Commons is a Dundee-based, grassroots project exploring what a different kind of internet could look like: one shaped by care, community values, inclusion, and mutual support, rather than profit, surveillance, or harm.
Working with women and the wider community, DD Commons creates and experiments with affirmative digital spaces that recognise lived experience, reduce online abuse, and open up access to digital tools and confidence, particularly for people who have historically been excluded from shaping technology.
Instead of asking people to adapt to harmful systems, DD Commons asks a more radical question:
How can digital spaces be designed to care for the people who use them?
The project focuses on rethinking both the culture and infrastructure of the internet from how online spaces are governed, to who gets to make decisions, to how digital tools can support collaboration, learning, and collective wellbeing.
Rooted in Dundee, DD Commons is part of a growing movement to reclaim digital space as a shared commons, owned and shaped by communities themselves. It shows that alternatives to big-tech platforms are not only possible, but already being built, locally, collaboratively, and with care.
DD Commons also provides the inspiration for an upcoming series of Digital Change for Climate Justice workshops, which will invite people to explore the hidden systems behind the internet, learn practical community tech skills, and imagine fairer, greener digital futures together.
This is an invitation, not just to observe change, but to be part of it.
The digital revolution doesn’t have to come from Silicon Valley. It can start in Dundee.
For more information, visit: https://ddcommons.net/
