Nextcloud recognized as a Digital Public Good

Nextcloud is joining a list of renowned digital solutions, including Mozilla, Creative Commons, and PeerTube, with its recognition as a digital public good by the Digital Public Good Alliance (DPGA). This milestone highlights our commitment to open source and online privacy, and grants opportunities to spread the word on the importance of open standards for digital tools.

What is the Digital Public Goods Alliance?

With the slogan “Unlocking the potential of open-source technologies for a more equitable world”, the DPGA supports the attainment, discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods. The multi-stakeholder initiative is endorsed by the UN Secretary-General and supports a wide range of organizations that want to advance digital public goods worldwide.

These goods have to meet a set of standards, as defined in the Digital Public Goods Standard: an open project open to contribution on GitHub, and developed in collaboration with organizations and experts. To be more specific, these are the nine requirements as set out by the DPGA to determine if software, data, AI systems, and/or content collections can be considered a DPG:

1. Be relevant to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
2. Use approved open licenses: For open source software, only OSI-approved licenses are accepted.
3. Have clear ownership
4. Be platform independent
5. Publish documentation of the source code, use cases, and/or functional requirements
6. Enable data extraction: non-PII data must be exportable in non-proprietary formats
7. Adhere to privacy and applicable laws
8. Adhere to standards & best practices
9. Be designed to do no harm, including demonstrating how it ensures data privacy and security if data is collected, having policies to identify inappropriate and illegal content, and having a process for users and contributors to protect themselves against grief, abuse, and harassment if interaction with users and contributors is possible.

With its DPGA membership, which will be re-evaluated every year, Nextcloud has proven that it meets all nine indicators.

Other Nextcloud initiatives for digital freedom and sustainability

Nextcloud’s recognition as Digital Public Good is in line with other initiatives showing our dedication to values such as sustainability, an inclusive open source community, and digital sovereignty.

• Nextcloud Include initiative: As an open source diversity project, Nextcloud Include addresses the needs of underrepresented groups to join the Nextcloud project. By building an inclusive and diverse space to collaborate, Nextcloud aims to ensure the development of world-class software. The “Nextcloud Include” project focuses on mentoring, travel support, and internships.
• Blauer Engel ecolabel: In 2025, Nextcloud became the first cloud software platform to be awarded the Blauer Engel ecolabel, a respected and independent certification that marks a product’s resource and energy efficiency. Awarded by the German Federal Environmental Agency, the certification marks a milestone in sustainable IT and sets a benchmark for others to follow.
• Sovereignty 2030: With our investment program “Sovereignty 2030”, Nextcloud aims to make its high-performance, sovereign open-source platform more widely available for organizations. The initiative sets out to invest more than 250 million Euros in digital sovereignty until 2030 in research and development, product innovations, and partner enablement, public education, and community projects to drive digital sovereignty in Europe.

These projects support other continuous Nextcloud efforts to spread the word on digital sovereignty and open source through webinars, international events and tradeshows, case studies, product releases, and Nextcloud gatherings, both online and offline.