An international collaboration between researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States, holding creative data in common.
Federated Data Commons for Creative Communities is an AHRC-funded effort to explore ways to share creative work and retain control of it. For two decades, contributing to a shared collection has meant handing it to a platform, often along with with the capacity to decide how it gets used and who gets to benefit.
This project explores how we might build the opposite: a commons where your data lives on a node that you hold, speaks to other nodes through signals, but stays governed by you and everyone else doing the sharing. The model landscape is our first public artifact, a transparent database that shares the characteristics of many existing models and attempts to show how open, “open” models really are.
Add your work to a local node you own and administer. Nothing leaves your control.
Nodes exchange signals (patterns, summaries, agreements) while originals stay put.
The community sets the terms of use together, and every member can withdraw at will.
Run open models locally, on hardware you control, over data you own.
The commons is a group. Shared verbs, shared stakes, shared say.
Every member can see, reshape, or withdraw their data at any time.
Choose to federate your commons into the wider community, a federated collection of creative data.
Follow along as we build. We'll share progress, frameworks, and workshops as they take shape.