This report maps current threats and opportunities facing the open movement, based on the ongoing work of the organizations behind the Common(s) Cause event, which took place in Katowice, Poland, as a pre-conference event for Wikimania 2024 on August 6, 2024.

The meeting was organized by Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Future, and Wikimedia Europe in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. The goal of the meeting was to create links between different advocacy efforts so that a shared advocacy strategy for the Knowledge Commons can be created.

One of the calls that jumped out for us was a call for defining new open principles – principles that could clarify what openness means in the context of today’s digital space and ensure its pro-public, democratic potential. Formulating such principles could help against several challenges, e.g. open washing.

Another clear call is the one confirming the assumptions behind the Common(s) Cause project: it is the call for a shared advocacy agenda, which could help ensure that Knowledge Commons are treated and sustained as critical digital infrastructures.

The event welcomed over 55 participants from 20 countries, most of whom traveled to Katowice to attend the Wikimania conference. The majority of attendees were from open advocacy communities. The event not only enabled the organizers to build stronger working ties with one another, but with the many other organizations who were represented at the event.

The participants acknowledged that the power of the open movement is only as strong as the bonds of the people working to advance an open, equitable agenda, and collective impact can only be achieved through individuals from different organizations working closely together.

The report identifies a few common causes that can be found at the intersection of open movement organizations’ strategies, the socio-technological zeitgeist, and current policy opportunities, such as:

1. (Re)defining openness in a new technological era.
2. Creation of a shared advocacy strategy and enhanced regional and thematic cooperation across the organizations.
3. Developing and testing governance approaches for our digital commons.
4. Advancing openness and sustainability for the technology, data, content, and governance of Digital Public Infrastructure.

This report is a starting point and serves as an invitation to the wider open community to join these causes as well as to formulate their own, which could then be backed by other organizations. The next step in this process will be disseminating its findings, hopefully resulting in further backing and refinement of the causes and additional feedback from the wider community, which this small convening could not fully represent.

Read the full report. 

Posted 18 November 2024