Which technology best supports democracy?

“Which technology best supports democracy?”

This is one of the questions many solo business owners ask because they want to choose technology that matches their values.

The companies developing alternatives to Big Tech products and platforms leveraging the open social protocol don’t get a lot of publicity for obvious reasons so it’s great to see that an awards event has been created to help us understand more about the work that is being done in this area.

From 74 submissions reviewed by an international jury of six experts in technology, media, and digital policy — Audrey Tang, Johannes Ernst, Laurens Hof, Melanie Bartos, Mike Masnick, Robin Berjon — three projects have been recognised as winners, with five receiving Honourable Mentions. The awards were presented as part of the PublicSpaces Conference 2026: Technology for Democracy and the prizes were sponsored by German public broadcaster ZDF and Bluesky.

The Grand Prize was awarded to the Newsmast Foundation, a London-based non-profit that helps organisations build their own safe, independent online communities.

Sill, from Tyler Fisher in Haarlem, Netherlands, is a tool that monitors what links the people you follow are sharing across Bluesky and Mastodon, and sends you a daily email digest of the most popular ones so you can stay informed without doomscrolling through your feed. It operates without advertising, algorithmic ranking, or engagement incentives.

Blacksky, from Rudy Fraser in New York City, is a platform where community members govern their own content recommendations and moderation policies — already the largest Black community on the open social web, with over 1.6 million authenticated viewers and 36,000 users who have chosen to move their accounts to Blacksky’s own servers.

See more about the award winners here: https://newpublic.org/OSA