Vasileios Kostakis, a Greek professor at TalTech School of Business and Governance since 2018, acknowledges that the world is currently facing serious technological crises. One risk factor is when countries or communities lack the capacity to manage technological development. “In Estonia's case, alongside the digital success story, I see a risk of technological dependence,” Kostakis notes.

He adds that Estonia has been a pioneer in digital governance, but it is time to consider whether we control these systems or simply use services provided by external parties. “Creating true technological sovereignty is critical,” he emphasises.

Where are you from, and how long have you been active in science?

I'm Greek, born in 1985. I've been active in research for nearly two decades now. My academic journey took me from the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki to Amsterdam, and then to Tallinn, where I completed my PhD in 2011 at TalTech. I've been a professor there since 2018, while also maintaining affiliations with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center. In parallel, I founded the P2P Lab in Ioannina, Greece, in 2013, a research hub that bridges academic inquiry with community practice. So while I'm Greek by origin, my work has always been genuinely transnational.

How did you get into science, and what fascinates you about it?

My path into science was unconventional. Around 2007, I became involved with the P2P Foundation, studying emerging phenomena like Wikipedia, open-source software, and collaborative production. I was captivated by a puzzle: here were communities creating extraordinary value—software worth trillions, encyclopaedias surpassing anything produced by corporations—yet doing so through cooperation rather than competition. This challenged everything I'd learnt in business school.
What fascinates me is how technology and governance intersect. Technology isn't neutral; it embeds values and shapes possibilities. Understanding how we might govern technology democratically, ensuring it serves communities rather than extracting from them; that question has driven my entire career.

What is the main scientific problem you are currently working on, and why is it important?

I'm working on whether technological commons (things like free software, open-source hardware, community energy systems) can function as “reparative ecosystems”. The core question is: under what conditions can these commons redistribute agency and sovereignty while resisting extraction and supporting ecological regeneration?
This matters urgently for several reasons. Free and open-source software has an equivalent proprietary development cost of $8.8 trillion, yet this immense value is increasingly captured by corporations that didn't create it. AI systems are appropriating humanity's collective knowledge at unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, communities worldwide depend on opaque, proprietary systems that reproduce extractive dynamics.

We need to understand whether technological commons can genuinely remedy historical appropriation, or whether they risk perpetuating it in new forms. The governance frameworks we establish now will shape whether technological responses to ecological breakdown reinforce extraction or enable justice.

What discoveries in your field have had the greatest societal impact so far?

Elinor Ostrom's work on governing the commons was transformative. She demonstrated that communities can successfully manage shared resources without privatisation or state control, earning her the Nobel Prize. This challenged dominant assumptions in economics and policy.
More recently, the practical demonstration that commons-based peer production actually works has been profound. Linux powers over 90% of cloud infrastructure, 85% of smartphones, and every top supercomputer. Wikipedia became the world's largest encyclopaedia. These aren't marginal experiments but fundamental infrastructure.
In my own field, the recognition that these aren't just curiosities but represent alternative productive models with implications for sustainability, democracy, and development has been significant. The concept of “cosmolocalism” (design global, manufacture local) shows how we might reorganise production around globally shared knowledge and locally appropriate manufacturing, with major implications for ecological transitions.

Based on your field of research, what do you think is the most important problem in Estonia or in the world today?

Globally, I see three interconnected crises related to technology. First, the extraction-enclosure crisis: AI systems trained on collective knowledge represent unprecedented appropriation, whilst platform companies systematically capture community-generated value. Second, the sovereignty crisis: communities lack institutional capacity to govern technological development, reproducing colonial relations through technology. Third, the ecological crisis makes addressing both existentially urgent.

For Estonia specifically, despite its digital success story, there's a risk of technological dependency—relying on infrastructure controlled elsewhere, with value flowing outward. Estonia has pioneered digital governance, but the question is whether citizens genuinely control these systems or merely use services provisioned by external actors. Building genuine technological sovereignty, perhaps through commons-based approaches to digital infrastructure and energy systems, seems crucial.
The broader challenge is ensuring that technological responses to climate breakdown don't simply entrench extraction in new forms; “green” technologies whose intellectual property concentrates in wealthy nations, whose production chains depend on extractive mining, whose design embeds assumptions of perpetual growth.

Which of your research achievements are you particularly proud of?

I'm proud of a few things. Conceptually, developing the “cosmolocalism” framework with colleagues—articulating how “design global, manufacture local” practices can reorganise value creation—has been influential, with adoption by other researchers and practitioners.
But I'm prouder of achievements that bridge research and practice. Founding the P2P Lab created a space where academic inquiry connects with real communities. My role as a founding member of Tzoumakers, a rural makerspace, and CommonEn, an energy cooperative in Greece, has shown that these ideas can become tangible institutions. Kopli 93, a community centre based in Tallinn, is also an initiative seeded by our group at TalTech's Ragnar Nurkse Department.
The Golden Nica for Digital Communities in 2016 recognised our collective work with the P2P Foundation. More recently, receiving the inaugural Michael Dower Award for promoting rural resilience in 2025 acknowledged that this research genuinely matters for communities. But what gives me most satisfaction is seeing former students and collaborators now leading their own projects, NGOs, and cooperatives—evidence that the mentoring and capacity-building dimension of research has lasting impact.

What further goals would you like to pursue in your research?

My current ambition is the R-COMMONS project, which would be the most comprehensive investigation yet of whether technological commons can function as genuinely reparative ecosystems. I want to understand the conditions under which commons redistribute agency and sovereignty rather than reproducing dependency in new forms.

Specifically, I aim to develop a historically grounded typology of governance mechanisms that enable redistributive outcomes; co-design “reparative commons” with marginalised communities facing ecological challenges; theorise how commons governance can institutionally represent non-human interests and long-term ecological timescales; and understand how reparative commons might scale without losing their transformative character.

Beyond this project, I want to continue bridging theory and practice, ensuring research produces tools communities and policymakers can actually use. The urgency is real: as AI governance frameworks are crafted and ecological breakdown accelerates, we need viable alternatives to extractive technological systems. My goal is that this research contributes to making such alternatives not just imaginable but institutionally achievable.

The article was published on Delfi Forte.