2026-05-09 –, Grégr Stage
We create more than ever online, yet own almost none of it. This talk explores how web decentralization technologies enable true content and data sovereignty: controlling not just your assets, but your words, social interactions, and presence on the web. Through real-world examples, I'll show what it looks like when people, not platforms, decide where their content lives.
Most of our digital lives, our writing, our replies, our ideas, exist on infrastructure we don't control. Platforms can alter, remove, or monetize our content without consent. While the decentralization community has made huge strides in financial sovereignty, the question of who owns our everyday digital expression remains largely unsolved.
This talk examines the problem from a web standards perspective. I'll walk through how existing decentralization technologies, such as personal data stores, federated social protocols, and linked data, give individuals control over their content, identity, and social interactions. I'll demonstrate a concrete tool for decentralized authoring, annotation, and scholarly communication that puts these ideas into practice today.
The audience will come away with a broader understanding of what data sovereignty means beyond assets and tokens, and why owning your words on the web is a problem worth solving.
Virginia is a developer and advocate for open source, decentralised web technologies. She is the co-founder of dokieli, a decentralised authoring and annotation tool, and former co-chair of the W3C Solid Community Group. Her work focuses on data sovereignty, open standards, and building a web where people control their own content and presence online.