We have long used the internet to bring in the voices of broader communities. With the pandemic, our programming further explored the future of learning in-community, online; acknowledging parallel questions about the infrastructure that supports—or limits—The Commons online. This thinking led to our connection with and support for a project based in Vancouver Canada, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Strategy Fund, led by Ashlee Conery with the support of arts organizations, arts workers and educators across Canada.
How do we understand The Commons online? More than 70% of the tools you use online were built on a foundation of open-source code. Open source refers to software that is written and shared freely in open forums, where other projects can "fork" it to use in their own work and share updates or improvements with the community. This is collectively maintained infrastructure that underpins many online tools including for-profit platforms. Access to this shared infrastructure allows projects with limited resources to experiment, create, and sustain the tools we all need to share information and improve access online.
Currently, arts organizations spend large sums developing native apps they cannot sustain on their own or rely on a patchwork of free and costly, for-profit tools and storage solutions that are indifferent to their needs or misuse their content to sell advertising and train problematic algorithms.
CubeCommons was created to address the environmental and economic sustainability of content storage online, creating a safer space for arts and cultural materials and their communities, and contributing Open Source code for future projects to build on. At its core, CubeCommons is about collective sustainability, where arts organizations, artists, and cultural workers can create free profiles, upload their audio, video, text, and PDF content, and rest assured that their materials won't be mined for data, used to sell ads, or train algorithms. We combined the functions of YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, and Issuu to help connect all the different materials made around art and cultural practices, making it easy to organize, share, or embed your content from an inexpensive and ethical platform.
Moreover, anyone with a profile on CubeCommons has a direct say in its development, terms of use, and privacy policies through the governance app Gov4git. The entire project has also been made Open Source for other projects looking to quickly and cost-effectively build their own inexpensive and energy-efficient databases.