CEO Reflection Ahead of 2025
2024 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN). The organisation, along with other actors in the movement, found itself actively questioning its role in the years to come. When our organisation was founded, fewer than ten million people were connected to the Internet. Yet a far greater number had digital artefacts in their hands, enabling the creation of programmes and systems and the dissemination of knowledge on a massive scale. Millions already had access to photocopiers, personal computers, CD recorders, floppy disks and control boards. So when connectivity arrived, there were already skilled individuals and communities with an emancipated relationship to digital technologies, and collective, collaborative, transnational projects were flourishing in many places, including ours.
Our initial approach was highly experimental, pioneering many areas in which neither the state nor businesses were yet deeply invested, such as open data systems or a flexible legal architecture for sharing across and beyond standard practices. We have succeeded in shifting values and institutional practices, with hundreds of governments and institutions adopting our legal, technical and social tools and approaches that enable distributed power, greater accountability and civic engagement, and appreciation of a shared culture.
But two decades later, the landscape is very different. We have four times more internet-connected devices collecting data points than people on the planet. Connected devices are controlled by very few, powerful and opaque corporations. Inequalities, despite increased connectivity, have risen sharply, wars and climate catastrophes are daily news as an anti-rights and pro-war agenda of the powerful moves rapidly.
We have also changed as a society, our social dynamics with technology are far different from the civic, creative and purposeful first moment two decades ago. So what is the role of organisations like ours today? How can we focus our efforts to increase impact and profound change, rather than just taking aspirin to today’s problems?
This year, we started answering these questions through The Tech We Want, a new initiative to articulate a positive vision for how and why we build technology, as well as its governance mechanisms, in a participatory way, as we did this year with the Open Data Editor. The tech we want is open, long-lasting, resilient and affordable, good enough to solve people’s problems, sustainable and democratically governed.
The tech we want is a means, a vehicle to open up knowledge, our purpose, to help people understand our world, unlock the latest scientific breakthroughs and tackle global and local challenges, expose inefficiencies, challenge inequality and hold governments and corporations to account. It is a vehicle for sharing power and inspiring innovation and a shared culture.
That’s where we will focus most of our efforts in 2025, working with our communities and allies, present and active on every continent.
We will continue to fight for a knowledge society rather than a surveillance society, one that benefits the many rather than the few and is built on the principles of collaboration rather than control, empowerment rather than exploitation, and sharing rather than monopoly. As we do so, we hope that through the Tech We Want we can count on you, our communities, to continue to break down the barriers to change.
