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Written by: Renata Ávila, Executive Director of Open Knowledge Foundation; Amalia Toledo, Lead Public Policy Specialist for Latin America and the Caribbean at Wikimedia Foundation.
Knowledge is the foundation of every modern society, underpinning democracy, driving innovation, and strengthening our collective culture. In the digital age, this bedrock is critical digital infrastructure (CDI), the essential software, standards, data systems, and information that provide public functions upon which society depends. By recognizing knowledge systems as CDI, we can move away from the current landscape of fragile, underfunded, and fragmented platforms, and toward a model that ensures long term-resilience and equitable access. This strategy also enables sovereign control over shared intellectual heritage — a duty that involves both the regulatory and protective roles of the nation-state and the rights of the communities who own the heritage (such as Indigenous peoples) to manage and oversee their own cultural data.
With a view to proposing public policy responses to this, the Wikimedia Foundation and the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) are working on a joint initiative to rethink open knowledge as critical digital infrastructure (CDI). Our goal is to ensure that digital knowledge commons — the shared, publicly accessible systems that allow information to be freely and openly created and distributed — receive the same strategic attention and investment, and benefit from strong governance, as essential public services such as water or electricity.
Why embark on this project?
The digital world is changing, and our current knowledge systems are fragile. We are facing several urgent situations that require us to rethink our infrastructure. First, political crises and climate change, ranging from wars to massive floods and fires, are causing the rapid loss of cultural assets and archives, often without documentation or even an inventory of what has been lost.
The expansion of AI systems is also creating a representation gap. Because modern AI is trained on massive datasets, it primarily reflects the languages and cultures that have well-funded, digitized, and open infrastructures. When governments fail to invest in their own digital knowledge commons, their local histories, languages and technical expertise are absent from the training data used by AI. This creates a bypass in which entire regions, particularly the Global South, become invisible and misrepresented by AI tools, further marginalizing their voices in the global digital economy.
The erosion of institutional memory is another challenge. Often, digital transformation focuses narrowly on automating bureaucracy, neglecting the long-term preservation of technical studies, policy frameworks, and historical records. These issues extend far beyond GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) to include the very repositories, databases, and online platforms used by government agencies and public research bodies.
Moving Toward a Better Understanding
To lay the groundwork for the initiative, we hosted a working breakfast during the Digital Public Goods Alliance annual meeting in Brasília, Brazil. On 25 November 2025, we brought together representatives from government, civil society, and international organizations to address a fundamental question: How can we integrate knowledge as CDI?
The discussion began with the recognition that an engaged knowledge base leads to an engaged society. From there, our exchanges led to several powerful ideas that could serve as an initial exploration for achieving practical public policy changes in this regard:
- Prioritize open infrastructure and “open knowledge by default” policies for all publicly funded research and data — in other words, embed openness into the very DNA of public knowledge systems.
- Consider, support, and protect platforms such as Wikipedia and other open knowledge systems as strategic assets and cultural heritage.
- Policies and regulations should recognize that while data is often presented as tabular data, knowledge includes unstructured stories, case studies, and lessons learned that enable a society to function.
- Ensure knowledge is a core component of any national or sectoral digital public infrastructure strategies.
- Move toward non-commercial investment models in which the private sector, dependent on open knowledge, also contributes to the latter’s infrastructure. Since technology companies create value from the open knowledge they use as raw material for their commercial products, a reciprocal model ensures that digital knowledge commons remain resilient, independent, and high-quality for everyone.
What’s Next?
This is just the beginning. Our initiative is a multistage process, and we are committed to gathering diverse perspectives to ensure our strategy remains globally relevant. Over the coming months, we will:
- Develop a position paper to refine the discussion points from our first conversation in concrete terms and propose specific public policy recommendations.
- Conduct a series of regional dialogues to assess the political desirability and feasibility of our recommendations, as well as to ensure that the positioning responds to local needs and concerns.
We invite everyone to help us define the future of the digital commons. Whether you are part of the open science community, a GLAM (i.e., galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) institution, a legislative or regulatory body, or another group concerned with access to reliable information online and the digital commons, your perspective is vital to ensuring that knowledge remains a transversal priority across health, education, innovation, and political participation.
Stay tuned for our upcoming schedule of regional dialogues during April to June of this year. Together, we can ensure that our collective knowledge is not only preserved, but also protected and helped to flourish, as a vital public good for generations to come.
