Digital sovereignty is not only about owning data or running your own servers. It is also about who can organise knowledge, who can verify it, who is allowed to ask questions, and who benefits from the answers.
In this talk, I will present Knowledge Scout, a Free Software approach to building self-determined knowledge libraries. Its guiding idea is simple: don’t ask the AI — ask collective knowledge. Instead of sending isolated questions into a black box, the software turns existing material — talks, PDFs, audio recordings, videos, images, web pages and reports — into dynamic, conversational and traceable knowledge spaces.
Knowledge Scout supports the whole journey: local and offline with personal folder structures for individual knowledge work; as a shared infrastructure for groups and organisations that curate knowledge together; and finally as an open library that makes selected content accessible to a wider public. Users always decide which sources to include and which contexts to trust.
I will demonstrate this through three real examples:
– SFSCON Talks makes past conference talks, slides and videos explorable through dialogue.
– The biodiversity library of the Natural History Museum in Bolzano brings scattered material on species, habitats and conservation measures into one central place.
– A library of climate proposals makes the often complex ideas from South Tyrol’s Citizens’ Council on Climate, together with expert perspectives and administrative responses, transparent, comparable and open for public discussion.
Technically, Knowledge Scout is based on shared folders, flexible storage locations, background processing, structured Markdown, RAG-based search and public library pages. But its most important design principle is transparency: the original sources are always visible, every AI transformation is traceable, and humans remain the authority that reviews and contextualises the results.
This turns AI from a centralised service into part of a civic infrastructure. A knowledge base does not have to be a Big Tech product you rent. This talk shows, in practical terms, how communities, research, public administration and citizens can use, run and co-create tools to regain control over their collective knowledge.
