Recently, Shared Assets worked with Digital Commons Cooperative (DCC) on a community tech project called Data for Community Assets. Over a series of workshops and interviews with community groups we sought to develop digital tools that would support the work of community groups taking on ownership of and running community assets.
This approach to developing technology is part of DCC’s wider technological ethos, whereby community needs and voices are the starting point for tech development. Using their skills as technologists, DCC creates technology with and for social movements. In their report ‘The Case for Community Tech’, Rachel Coldicutt and Anna Dent define community tech as follows:
“ [...] any hardware or software that delivers benefit to a community group, and which that community group has the authority to influence or control. A community group may create a piece of technology for their own use or use by other groups, or to be governed or adapted by other groups.”
This approach differs significantly from the prevailing approach to technological development. Today’s technology ecosystem is dominated by a small handful of tech giants, spearheaded by ultra-wealthy tech billionaires and overwhelmingly motivated by profit incentives. As of April 2025, seven out of ten of the largest companies in the world by market capitalisation were tech companies, with the “Big Five” tech companies – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft – all occupying the top six largest companies.
As Nik Marda from Mozilla explains, having a technological ecosystem that is dominated by the market will “prioritise a narrow set of profitable applications”, whereas critical work that brings meaningful collective benefit will remain under-resourced and neglected.
As an example, Marda notes that the market is much more likely to develop technology for landlords to collude or fix rents artificially high, instead of for tenants to identify price-gouging landlords. The report’s conclusion is that power must be distributed to ensure that communities are able to influence and determine the future trajectories of tech development: “We can’t only say what we’re against – we have to also say what we’re for”.
The mission of Digital Commons, a co-operatively-owned community tech organisation, is “to craft technology that empowers social movements. For us, that means placing social movements at the heart of every stage – from identifying their needs, to designing, implementing, and refining solutions.”
Over the course of the Data for Community Assets project, Shared Assets and DCC conducted interviews and workshops with dozens of practitioners in the community ownership ecosystem across the UK to ask them what digital tools could support their work. Throughout, a common response was: is technology what we need? Unsurprisingly, much higher up the needs list for these groups was resourcing and funding to realise their community asset project, realistic legislative avenues for community ownership, curbing competition from private developers, and advice and support when navigating the bureaucratic labyrinths of planning and governance policies.
For both Shared Assets and Digital Commons, this question represents a healthy scepticism towards technological development – whereby technosolutionism is not posited as a quick fix to a host of social issues, as the government and private sector love to present, but where technology is viewed as one small tool within a much larger and complex movement for systemic change.
As community groups began to consider possibilities for digital tools that could support their work – many doing so for the first time – they repeatedly stressed the challenges of accessing the information they need to be able to take on and run assets in their area. In particular, this included land-based data such as: ownership information, environmental characteristics, planning history, building conditions and uses, and site infrastructure.
Access to land ownership data was the highest priority for interviewees and workshop participants – it is no secret that ownership information in the UK is extremely opaque. Currently, it costs £7 to view a single land title on the Land Registry, the national register for ownership data in England and Wales. With 24 million land titles held on the Registry, this would cost a total of £164 million to find out who owns all of England and Wales. There are however some potentially encouraging signs that the Registry may soon be made more transparent.
In Scotland, where land that is not registered on the Register of Scotland is estimated at nearly 56% of total land mass coverage, access to land data is even more complicated. Many land titles are still held on the archaic Registry of Sasines, the world’s oldest national land registry, which was established in 1618. For the layperson, making sense of the archaic deeds held on the Sasines is extremely challenging.
As previous Shared Assets research has identified, having access to ownership and other land-based data is crucial for realising community ownership projects – for identifying potential sites, and submitting applications and ownership bids. This information is also necessary for campaigning for land system change at local and national levels in the UK. As the ‘Who Owns England?’ campaign has exposed, 1% of the population own half of England, but the details of this information are opaque and secret. Transparency around land ownership is a crucial and bare-minimum first step to creating an equitably distributed land system.
To increase access to ownership information and other land-based data, Shared Assets created Land Explorer, a free open-source mapping tool, which DCC now runs. The tool brings together ownership data, including full access to commercial data, as well as environmental information such as flood plains, agricultural classification, and sites of special scientific interest. There are different layers allowing users to search by landowner – for example, users can select the Ministry of Defence layer to view all areas of Ministry of Defence land in the UK, one of the largest landowners in the UK, owning a total 1.4% of all landmass.
As part of the Data for Community Assets project, community groups expressed the importance of making more ownership information available on Land Explorer. Digital Commons added additional layers for local authority-owned land, and Church of England-owned land as a result. DCC also added a feature that would allow community groups the option to export a site map, after requests during the workshops.
In this way, Land Explorer seeks to make information available that may otherwise be inaccessible to community groups and social movements, held behind paywalls or in opaque government registries. The tool will build capacity for community groups seeking to take on land and assets into collective stewardship, and hopefully build capacity through open access to information, alleviating some of the challenges faced on collective ownership journeys. Shared Assets and Digital Commons are currently working on the Data for Housing Justice project, seeking to create digital tools that build capacity for housing activists.
Creating further opportunities for community tech development is vital for establishing a more diverse technological ecosystem where innovation is not dominated by the interests of the market, but by fulfilling unmet needs of community groups and social movements. As Rachel Coldicutt writes in Tech for Today and for Tomorrow:
“Community tech meets needs that markets cannot, will not, and should not be the default provider for. Community tech exemplifies the need for tech foundations, spread geographically and socially, and demonstrates the power and potential of innovation at a local level.”
Shared Assets and Digital Commons will be continuing to explore further ways to work together to support community tech development - if you are interested in this work, feel free to get in touch via hello[at]sharedassets.org.uk or hello[at]digitalcommons.coop.