Category: Day 3

How do we build educational technology that serves liberation rather than surveillance? This session explores “cooperative digital organizing. “Creating community-controlled spaces that prioritize privacy, consent, and collective decision-making over engagement metrics and data extraction.

Drawing on the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age’s transition from academic organization to cooperative network, we’ll share what we’re learning about how educational communities can reclaim digital sovereignty. We’ll examine our journey from Google Workspace and social media to privacy-first tools like Nextcloud, Signal, and self-hosted alternatives. Not as technical solutions, but as pedagogical choices.

We’ll explore together:

• Privacy by Design principles for educational communities
• Tool choice as curriculum—how platforms shape learning relationships
• Cooperative governance models for shared decision-making
• Consent-based participation honoring different comfort levels
• Community care infrastructure supporting sustainable organizing

Through case studies from our migration away from extractive platforms. What’s working, what isn’t, what we’re figuring out. We’ll collaborate on creating resilient, trust-centered digital communities. Come ready to share experiments, challenges, and questions about building educational technology serving the community rather than capital.

Is your ed tech free, open, and connected? Do you wish it was? Commons In A Box OpenLab is free and open source software that enables you to launch a commons space for open learning and customize it to meet the needs of your community. Built using WordPress and BuddyPress via a multi-institution partnership, it supports open education, connection, and collaboration. Members create and configure their own learning spaces, reaching across disciplinary and institutional boundaries to share their work with one another and, if they wish, openly on the web.

Our session brings together representatives from OpenLabs large and small, long-established and brand new, at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY School of Professional Studies, Macaulay Honors College, SUNY Oneonta, the University of New Haven, and the original OpenLab at City Tech.

Our focus will be on the connections CBOX OpenLab makes possible: through its technical architecture, among members at our individual institutions, and between our institutions. We’ll hear lightning talks from the teams about their OpenLabs, followed by group discussion of how we work together, successes and challenges, and audience Q&A.

Come to our session and learn how CBOX OpenLab provides a launchpad for vibrant learning communities and how we’re building a growing network outside ed tech’s walled gardens, sharing ideas and providing mutual support. We’d love you to join the conversation and spark new collaborations.