Summer 2025 Newsletter 🌞

In this edition:

🔍 Digital autonomy in Europe 

🌐 Alkemio on the web

🎉 Celebrating ecosystem wins

🤝 Alkemio in the community 

📅 Upcoming Events 

🤔 Getting us thinking..

🏖️ Summer reading list 

🚀 Platform updates 

An idea, five years on! 🥳

In the depths of the 2020 pandemic, communities collectively navigated unprecedented challenges. The experience highlighted the need for digital infrastructure that enables and supports more effective collaboration between individuals and organisations. Alkemio is building that foundation for society to excel at collective action.

🔍 Building for digital autonomy in Europe 

At Alkemio, we’ve chosen the harder path, limiting our reliance Big Tech to stay aligned with our purpose. In this post, we share our learnings from our decision and its impact on our infrastructure, funding, policy, and trust. It’s a glimpse into the trade-offs and the values that guide our work. Read our blog here. 

🌐 Alkemio on the web

Along with We Are Stewards, Alkemio asked: "Would investors be enticed to support companies that aim to be ‘self-owned’, decouple voting rights from economic rights and cap the economic returns for investors?" The short answer is: yes! Read an in-depth summary of our conversations with leading Dutch investors.

🎉 Celebrating wins in our ecosystem 

1. More governments are exploring a world beyond Big Tech. In June, the Danish government proposed ditching Microsoft software in favour of digital independence and reducing their reliance on U.S. tech firms. The decision follows similar proposals across Europe in light of geopolitical tensions and U.S. Big Tech's undue influence within the political sphere. 

2. In a milestone for the steward-ownership community, Q2 2025 saw 4 Dutch institutional investors do their first investments into steward-owned startups! DOEN Participaties and Fair Capital Impact Fund invested in CrowdBuilding, the mission-driven platform that facilitates collective self-building. Read the press release here. And Triodos Regenerative Money Centre and Oost NL invested in Sumthing, the platform that makes it easy and fun to see how your support helps restore nature. More details here. 

🤝 Alkemio in the community

1. Alkemio was at the PublicSpaces Conference, where our CEO, Neil Smyth, took the stage for a lightning talk. He presented what it truly takes to achieve digital autonomy and made the case for two essential shifts in how we build technology today. Read our update here. 

2. Alkemio supported and joined the AI Coördinatie Nederland hackathon where 60 professionals collaborated to create a future for responsible and effective use of artificial intelligence within the Dutch public sector. Our team participated in the hackathon and supported the event through onsite and online program facilitation.

3. The movement for European digital sovereignty is gaining further momentum. Alkemio joined technology policymakers, researchers, and industry partners at EuroStack: a concrete pathway to European digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy, hosted by CEPS in Brussels.  Find the event recording here.  

4. We were encouraged by the political will to imagine a different technology future at the Digital Summit 2025. In answering the question, "What political choices are needed to shape tomorrow’s digital society?", topics such as digital democracy, sustainable digitalisation, and digital autonomy took centre stage at the events hosted by Netwerk Digitale Samenleving of GroenLinks-PvdA. 

📅 Upcoming Events 

Where to find Alkemio in the coming months

1. Norrsken Impact/Week 2025 | Barcelona, SP | October 1-2, 2025

2. SO:25 Steward-Ownership Conference | Berlin, DE | October 9, 2025

3. ImpactFest | The Hague, NL | October 30, 2025

4. Mozilla Festival | Barcelona, SP| November 7-9, 2025

🤔 Getting us thinking..

We asked the Alkemio team to share articles that caught their attention. Here are three we enjoyed:

1. The Future of Innovation Is Collective | SSIR 

2. What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works | The Atlantic 

3. Koers zetten richting digitale autonomie (Dutch) | The Rathenau Instituut 

🏖️ Summer reading list

Neil retreated to the beautiful Italian countryside for a summer vacation. We want to share his reading list with you:

1. Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us - Jon Alexander

2. Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center - Henry Mintzberg 

3. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI - Karen Hao 

🚀 Platform Updates

We have introduced a suite of enhancements designed to streamline your platform experience. The sign-in interface has been updated with a modern design. 

New Space templates are now available to prepare a digital home for your multi-stakeholder initiatives in seconds. Created from our experiences facilitating a community of practice or supporting a research project, these templates provide a high-level flow and necessary functionalities to get started. Moreover, our Subspace templates are now more intelligent; descriptions and configuration settings are populated automatically, enabling you to initiate projects quickly.  

Improvements to our Virtual Contributors make collaboration even more efficient, and notifications now prompt users when a new version of the platform is available. 

Posting functionality is now unified for greater convenience. With the new Post feature, you can seamlessly add whiteboards, upload files, and share comments, all within a single streamlined workflow. This allows for more efficient communication and collaboration, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tools.

Try it out and let us know what you think! Check out the full details 👉 Read more here.