Our New Field Guide: ‘The Tech We Want | Read This Before You Build’

At the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), we’ve spent the past 20 years building tools, enabling communities, and advocating for openness to solve pressing global challenges. Along the way, we’ve also had to unlearn some old ways of working – like building tech in silos, assuming technical language was easy to understand, or prioritising cool features over usability.

That process of reflection is what inspired our new field guide on how to build public interest tech with communities: The Tech We Want | Read This Before You Build.

The guide is part of The Tech We Want initiative, our ongoing conversation about how to create digital tools that are simple, long-lasting, and genuinely useful as a counterpoint to the overengineered stacks of Big Tech companies.

Key content of the guide includes:

🙋🏾‍♀️ 8 questions every team should ask before building new tech, from “Who are we building this for?” to “Who will maintain it?”

📝 Field notes from our journey with the Open Data Editor (ODE) – a free desktop app we built over several years to help detect errors in datasets. At first, it was too complex, too technical, and disconnected from our community, but by redesigning collaboratively, ODE became a simple, accessible tool now used by researchers, journalists, non-profits, and governments around the world.

🤗 Practical tips on building with communities, through relationship building, pilot projects, feedback loops, and plain language.

🤖 Honest reflections on how and when to integrate AI responsibly.

✍️ A hands-on self-assessment exercise to help teams reflect on readiness before they write a single line of code.

The main message is simple: sometimes the most radical act is to slow down, build smaller, and listen more. Just as the ballpoint pen 🖊️ or safety pin 🧷 have endured because of their simplicity and adaptability, so too can public interest technologies be purposefully created to last with and for real people.

Read the Guide Here

We’d love to know: what have you had to unlearn when building tech? Share your reflections with us at info@okfn.org and over our social channels #TheTechWeWant. Let’s keep learning (and unlearning) together.

Launch Event (Recording)

Are you getting ready to build public interest tech?

Join us to celebrate the launch of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s field guide, ‘The Tech We Want | Read This Before You Build.’

This is an opportunity to engage in an open conversation with the Open Knowledge team, the publication’s authors, and representatives from the second cohort of Open Data Editor (ODE) pilot organisations to explore the process of learning and unlearning ways of building tech with communities.

🗓️ 30 September 2025
🕒 15:00 CEST
📍 Online

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to:

The OKFN team, whose ideas and practices are the basis of this publication: Renata Ávila (CEO), Cassandra Woolford (Director of Operations & Finance), Patricio Del Boca (Tech Lead and Open Activist), Sara Petti (Project & Community Manager), Lucas Pretti (Communications & Advocacy Director), Andrés Vázquez Flexes (Senior Software Developer), Romina Colman (Product Owner), Ramya Chandrasekhar (Data & AI Specialist), Renu Kumari (Frictionless Data Community Lead), Nico Bases (Software Developer), and Mariam Asatryan (UX Designer).
The OKFN publications squad, who captured and gave shape to these ideas and practices in a comprehensive and interactive format: Solana Larsen (Editor) and Constanza Figueroa Bustos (Illustrator and Graphic Designer).
All Open Data Editor contributors, especially Ana Carolina Moreno, Andikan Eduok, Anicely Santos, Camilo D’Aloisio, Crispin Ngakani, Cristina Claverol, Debra Chibaya, Denaya Dennis, Eduardo Ferreyra, Eli Vivas, Evgeny Karev, Faith Kenny, Gibran Mena, Guergana Tzatchkova, Jugal Mahabir, Juliana Soares Lima, Kristian Ravić, M. Rafiul Bahar Rafi, Madelon Hulsebos, Mohammed Kamal-Deen Fuseini, Mohit Garg, Nicole Siggins, Nika Aleksejeva, Nikesh Balami, Nuela Ada Ononiwu, Omar Luna, Pauline Karega, Priya Rangra, Richard Muraya, Saliou Abdou, Seun Olufemi, Smreeta Shrestha, Sridhar Gutam, Tatenda Tavingeyi, Thays Lavor, Tsenguun Tumurkhuyag and Tshidino Oreal.

Relive the entire history of ODE alongside our communities with this series of blog posts.