Tech and digital sovereignty discussions were everywhere in 2025 – podcasts, events, Co-op Congress, even the Ethical Consumer Conference. There’s a tangible energy and ambition around it.

However, I’m frustrated by the gap between talk and follow-through. Co-op Congress in Rochdale, for example, was great, but I came away asking: what actually got agreed, proposed, adopted, or changed afterwards?

Meanwhile, stories abound in the news of organisations and individuals being adversely affected by politically motivated changes affecting US tech services. Take this story about how the US sanctioned the International Criminal Court, locking its staff out of basic online activities.

So my question is: what can we actually do now to increase the resilience of socially positive organisations to changes in US tech policy?

Let’s be realistic. We’re not going to suddenly create open source tech stacks (chips, hardware, everything), and we can’t go around telling clients to drop Microsoft or Salesforce overnight and use open source alternatives. Full autonomy isn’t happening any time soon.

But we can take practical steps to loosen our dependence on US tech. And these steps can also be a business opportunity for tech co-ops.

We can…

Shift defaults:

We can individually move our own – and our client’s – services away from US platforms where viable (for instance, hosting, analytics, docs, comms). At Outlandish, we’ve already started: we started switching to Plausible Analytics from Google this year, we’re looking to host away from Amazon Web Services, and we’re experimenting with Germany’s Hetzner hosting instead.

Package it

we can turn “sovereignty” into concrete offerings for new and existing clients. For example, sovereignty audits. Or migration plans and phased transitions, such as a ‘we’ll move your org from US-based Google Analytics to open-source Plausible Analytics, and replicate your setup’ package

Use funding strategically:

We can track and apply for commons-aligned funding to build shared tools, reduce duplicated effort across the co-op ecosystem, and provide a secondary income stream.

For instance, NLnet is offering grants of 5,000 to 50,000 Euros and runs the NGI Zero Commons Fund, to expand new internet commons across the whole technology spectrum, from hardware and infrastructure to end-user applications.

If you’re building tech, you might also want to consider applying for sector-specific programmes and open-sourcing your product for the benefit of that sector. This is the approach we’ve taken with NookCRM, our open-source CRM for the Community Energy sector.

Make it all tangible through events:

We can run in-person programmes that end with takeaways — playbooks, templates, migrations, shared procurement — rather than vibes. Doing this will help establish co-ops as the holders of knowledge and interconnecting nodes for tech sovereignty, and increase our appeal to larger organisations as delivery partners.

Advocate:

I’d like to see Co-operatives UK put proper funding behind this too: transition support for member organisations, and investment in co-operatively owned tech platforms (such as supporting a UK-based meet.coop server, or investing in its ongoing maintenance costs).

And finally, we can read and educate ourselves:

I recommend:

  1. Doug Belshaw’s great post on why emotion & crisis gets people off US tech, not rational arguments. One to share with your decision-making team?
  2. Paris Marx’s guide to getting off US tech: although it’s aimed at individuals, it lists a bunch of common tools we might use and the non-US alternatives we could switch to.