The dominant logic of the tech industry is simple: collect as much data as possible, use it to predict and influence behavior, and monetize the resulting insights. Users generate the data; companies own it. The product is free, but you are the product.
This model has proven extraordinarily profitable and extraordinarily harmful. It has fueled surveillance capitalism, deepened inequality between platforms and users, and hollowed out the public institutions that might otherwise have gathered and acted on the same information.
But there is another way, and we think it finally deserves its own name.
Does This Model Already Have a Name?
Sort of. Academics and policy researchers talk about "data commons," a cooperative framework where data is governed and shared among community participants with an emphasis on openness and equity. There are also "data cooperatives," which go further and give communities democratic ownership over the data they generate.
These are good concepts. But they do not quite capture what we are doing at Evocultiva.
A data commons tends to be governed by the community itself. A data cooperative is typically structured around pooling data to negotiate collectively, often to monetize it.
So we are proposing a term: civic data.
A civic data model is one where the product you sell generates data that belongs to the community that uses it, where that data is used to coordinate with and through existing public institutions rather than to replace or route around them. Crucially, the business sustains itself not by monetizing the data but through a combination of hosting subscriptions from users who want that convenience, partnerships with the associations and public bodies that benefit from the aggregated picture, and over time, grants and research relationships that recognize the commons being built as a public good worth funding.
The word "civic" does a lot of work here. It implies a relationship to shared public life, to institutions, to collective action. It implies that the data has a community purpose, not just a commercial one. And it implies accountability: civic actors answer to someone beyond their investors.
What We Do at Evocultiva
At Evocultiva, we build connected monitoring tools for people working in agriculture, environmental stewardship, and rural production. Currently our flagship devices are a beehive monitor and a greenhouse monitor. Devices that help people understand what is happening in the living systems they care for.
The data these devices collect is valuable. Not because we can sell behavioral profiles or target advertising, but because the people using our tools are navigating real, consequential challenges: crop disease, pest pressure, climate variability. They need better information. And so do the associations, cooperatives, and public agencies that work alongside them.
So we made a decision. The data our users generate with our products belongs to them and to the broader communities that can act on it. We sell the hardware at close to cost, because the point of the device is to get a good tool into the field, not to extract margin from the people doing the work. We offer optional hosting for those who want us to store and visualize their data on our platform, and that subscription is one of the things that keeps us running. Those who prefer to run their own server locally and retain full data privacy can do that too. And as the regional datasets we steward grow in value, we expect to build partnerships with associations, public agencies, and research institutions who have good reasons to support what is being built. Our business does not depend on owning the data. It depends on the data being genuinely useful to enough people and institutions that the infrastructure around it is worth sustaining.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Imagine fifty farmers and beekeepers across Navarra, each using one of our monitors. Data flows in: hive weights, temperature gradients, weather observations. Alongside the numbers, users enter notes. "Heavy mite pressure on the eastern apiaries." "Fungal spotting on the lower fields." "Second dry week in a row."
On their own, those notes are personal records. Aggregated and anonymized across a region, they become something much more powerful: an early warning system.
This is an important point worth being direct about. When we talk about sharing data, we are not talking about sharing anyone's individual records. No association or institution we work with ever sees that a specific farm or apiary reported a specific problem. What they see is the regional pattern: that mite pressure is up across the province, that yields are dropping in a particular valley, that a treatment approach is working broadly. The value of the data is entirely in the aggregate. Identifying individual users would not only be a betrayal of trust, it would also make the data less useful, not more.
If varroa mite counts spike simultaneously across a dozen hives in the same province, that is not a coincidence. It is an outbreak. If a certain irrigation or treatment approach appears consistently in the notes of producers whose yields are holding up, that is actionable knowledge. Neither insight requires knowing who any individual beekeeper is.
Under the extractive model, this information would be proprietary. A company would use it to refine its products, perhaps sell insights to agrochemical firms, and certainly not share it freely with the people who generated it.
Under the civic data model, we take that aggregated, anonymized regional picture and bring it directly to the associations and cooperatives that represent these communities. We work with them, not around them. If all the beekeepers in Navarra are reporting varroa pressure at the same time, we help surface that signal and support the association in coordinating a regional response: targeted treatment campaigns, shared resources, communication with agricultural authorities.
The data becomes a tool for collective action, not a commodity.
A Note on Self-Hosting
One thing we want to be clear about: the civic data model is not in conflict with the self-hosting movement. It is designed to sit alongside it.
Some of our users have the technical capacity and the preference to run their own infrastructure. We think that is good. It keeps them in full control of their data, it reduces dependency on any single provider including us, and it strengthens the broader culture of technological autonomy that we believe in.
Our hosted platform is an option, not a requirement. Users who self-host can still contribute to aggregated regional datasets if they choose to, under the same terms as everyone else. The hardware we sell does not require everyone to use our servers.
This is actually one of the places where the civic data model differs most sharply from the extractive one. A surveillance capitalist needs you on their platform. We do not. We would rather you have real options.
Why This Matters Beyond Our Tools
These are useful entry points precisely because the stakes are legible. The health of a hive is something you can measure, and the consequences of getting it wrong are real and local.
But the principle applies far beyond agricultural monitoring.
Think about air quality sensors deployed across a neighborhood. Or noise pollution monitors managed by an urban community association. Or energy consumption data collected by a rural cooperative. In each case, the people closest to the problem are generating the data, and under the current tech logic, that data flows upward to platforms, aggregators, and investors, and rarely back to the communities that need it most.
The civic data model says those communities should govern the data, benefit from it, and use it to coordinate with each other and with public institutions. Companies that build the tools can sustain themselves by making good hardware and offering optional services. The data itself is not the product. The tools and the hosting are.
The Role of Associations and Institutions
One thing the extractive model consistently fails to do is connect individual data to collective governance. A company that knows its users are suffering a shared problem has no structural incentive to make that problem visible to anyone who might solve it at scale. That information is competitive advantage, not a public service.
Associations and cooperatives exist precisely to coordinate responses to shared challenges. They have the legitimacy, the relationships, and the local knowledge to translate a regional warning into real action. Our role is to help them see the signal, not to replace them.
This means our platform is designed to speak to associations, not just to individual users. Aggregated regional reports, trend dashboards, and alert thresholds are built with collective use in mind. We are building infrastructure for communities that already exist and already care, not trying to create a new community around a product.
A Business Model That Tells the Truth
We are sometimes asked whether this approach is financially sustainable. It is a fair question, and we want to answer it honestly rather than with the usual startup vagueness.
We sell hardware at close to cost. That is a deliberate choice, not a temporary one. The monitor in the field is not where we make our money. It is how we start a relationship with someone doing real work in the world.
Hosting subscriptions are the first real revenue layer. Users who want us to store, visualize, and aggregate their data pay for that service. We provide something useful, you pay a reasonable amount for it, and we use that to keep the infrastructure running.
The third leg, and the one we find most interesting, is institutional. As the regional datasets we steward grow, their value to associations, cooperatives, public agricultural agencies, and research groups becomes real and concrete. A beekeeping federation that can see varroa pressure across an entire region in near real time has something worth paying for. A regional government trying to understand the effects of a dry spring on smallholder farms has something worth funding. We are building a public good, and public goods have historically attracted public and institutional support when they demonstrate genuine value. That is a more honest and more durable funding story than pretending any single revenue stream will carry us on its own.
None of this depends on the data becoming a commodity. The data stays where it belongs. The infrastructure around it is what we are here to build and sustain.
An Invitation
If you are a farmer, beekeeper, forester, member of a rural cooperative or agricultural association, an environmental researcher, or anyone who cares about what is happening to the landscapes and living systems around you, we want to hear from you.
The data ecosystem we are building is only as useful as the community that shapes it. We are not looking for passive users. We are looking for collaborators. People who will tell us what they need, hold us to our commitments, and help us understand what genuinely useful regional intelligence should look like for the communities they are part of.
The land does not have a lobby. But it has all of us.