Tara Merk
Tara is a postdoc researcher at the CNRS, Paris, an ICDE research fellow at The New School in New York and associate researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin. Her research focuses on platform and protocol governance, DAOs and exploring alternative ownership structures for data centers. Her PhD thesis explores the process of Exit to Community, i.e. transitioning organizations and technologies in the digital platform economy into community ownership and governance.
Sessions
What if local communities operated their own data centres? How might that look and function? To what extent would it be democratic and sustainable? Who would (not) benefit from it?
In this workshop, we would like to think through, examine and discuss alternative models for the ownership and management of collective data centres. We will take a structured look at fundamental concepts, governance issues and implications, as well as discuss parallel ideas in other areas (cooperative banks or housing, community-supported agriculture) in the hope of initiating a broad discussion about alternatives to the profit and exploitation logic of the current data centre industry. Similar approaches to data centers that already exist include Nubo (Belgium), Espora (Mexico) and Wobcom (Germany).
What if local communities operated their own data centres? How might that look and function? To what extent would it be democratic and sustainable? Who would (not) benefit from it?
In this workshop, we would like to think through, examine and discuss alternative models for the ownership and management of collective data centres. We will take a structured look at fundamental concepts, governance issues and implications, as well as discuss parallel ideas in other areas (cooperative banks or housing, community-supported agriculture) in the hope of initiating a broad discussion about alternatives to the profit and exploitation logic of the current data centre industry. Similar approaches to data centers that already exist include Nubo (Belgium), Espora (Mexico) and Wobcom (Germany).