Across Europe, institutions are seeking credible, sovereign, open alternatives to proprietary cloud platforms. France’s public digital agency, DINUM, took a bold step in that direction by developing La Suite, a fully open-source service stack. What is unique is not only the openness of the code, but the ambition: that a public administration can edit and publish digital commons for the public good.

But building a commons is only the first step. Ensuring long-term adoption, usability, and sustainability requires an ecosystem. This is the role of LaSuite.coop, a SCIC (Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif), which extends La Suite beyond the administration to local governments, universities, associations, cooperatives, and civil society. As a democratic, multi-stakeholder cooperative, LaSuite.coop enables users not just to access the tools, but to co-govern them — reclaiming strategic control over their digital environment.

LaSuite.coop brings together several open-source service providers — Open Source Politics, Yaal, lebureau.coop, Galae— who mutualise development, DevOps, hosting, support, UX, and community engagement. This model funds open-source development sustainably without enclosure, venture capital, or extractive business models.

This talk explores how La Suite and LaSuite.coop illustrate a public–private–commons partnership model:

a public entity creating and guaranteeing the commons,

a cooperative ecosystem maintaining and scaling it,

a community steering its evolution,

and a sustainable business model aligned with the public good.

We believe this hybrid model offers a concrete blueprint for future European digital commons.