This report examines the concept of Openness in the digital age, tracing its history, current state, and key challenges, particularly in the face of the rapid developments around Artificial Intelligence. It draws primarily from expert interviews and literature review. The Open Definition by the Open Knowledge Foundation, emphasizing free access, use, modification, and sharing, serves as a baseline to understand the concept. However, the report underlines the need for revision to address contemporary challenges.
While Openness has achieved mainstream success and is recognized as a significant driver of innovation and societal value, it currently faces considerable pressure. Key challenges include conflicting definitions and usage, market consolidation leading to power concentration, the growing entanglement of Openness in geopolitics, and internal issues within the Open movement, including a lack of a unified purpose as well as unforeseen consequences of practices.
The authors present three alternative scenarios to distill and contrast different approaches and priorities of Openness along the dimensions objective, focus, and intentionality: A continuation of the current status quo, a (re-)focus on technical and legal aspects, and a shift towards a new purpose-driven understanding. While all three scenarios present opportunities for the future of Openness, the authors argue for a stronger purpose-driven approach.
The paper provides recommendations for the way ahead, categorized into three areas. First, rethinking Openness: This involves contextualizing Openness to serve a purpose beyond itself, emphasizing participatory approaches, and considering power dynamics as well as potential harms. The authors share the analysis of many experts that Openness is still a relevant concept. However, it rather takes the shape of a guiding principle in the background rather than as a primary purpose. Openness is increasingly implied by or associated with other terms. It has largely lost ist rallying power to activists and communities. Second, strengthening the foundations: This includes adding guard rails to open licenses to prevent misuse, investing in open innovation and infrastructure, building more compelling narratives, strengthening civil society, boosting digital literacy, and pushing for more Open government data. Third, addressing power and markets: This requires embracing the political dimension of Openness, taking action against monopolist structures and market domination through stronger antitrust regulation, possible taxation and a limitation of behavioral tracking.
In conclusion, the report calls for an active and intentional approach to reshape Openness with a clear purpose, such as strengthening public interest and democracy.