2026-09-30T16:15:31
We are in a critical moment for the open web, and must raise the issues of openness and the commons to the level of public dialogue as we try to steer AI development to serve the public interest. We are also in a moment when open is being hailed as a panacea for digital sovereignty. This warrants interrogation.
On September 21st, Creative Commons convened leading experts, practitioners, and builders for a day of conversation about the collaborative underpinnings of openness, investigating all the layers of the stack for a better, shared understanding of what openness can—and cannot—do to help communities and nations drive towards digital sovereignty.
This event was made possible through the generous support of the Siegel Family Endowment. We are grateful to our co-hosts at the NYU Engelberg Center for making the space for a conversation like this.
Clear throughlines from the convening were:
As we prepare for the AI Summit in Geneva next year, we see it as our responsibility to convene conversations, to collaborate with aligned organizations, and, ultimately, to build tools that enable the future we want to see.
We started the day with a simple proposition: that openness and digital sovereignty are deeply intertwined, but openness alone is not a sovereignty strategy. Digital sovereignty is all about our ability to make meaningful choices about the digital systems on which we depend. And yes, openness can help create those choices through the freedom to inspect, adapt, share, collaborate, and—perhaps most importantly—move away from systems that no longer serve us when that’s necessary.
These freedoms only translate into sovereignty, though, when we have the capacity to exercise them. Infrastructure, skills, governance, resources—these are all things we need to make those choices real.
When discussing openness, collaboration and digital sovereignty, a conversation led by Vidisha Mishra from Global Solutions Initiative, panelists explored how countries and communities can build capacity together rather than assuming sovereignty means doing everything alone. We heard about the possibilities for middle-power collaboration, and the role that shared resources can play in expanding our options. Paul Samson from CIGI described this as “strategic interdependence.” This is a mindset we can lean into while leveraging the heightened awareness that openness has. It is also critical to moving forward on initiatives like 50 in 5—advancing DPI in 50 countries in 5 years, an important effort to share learnings, best practices and technologies to advance global digital public infrastructure. Mitchell Baker, co-founder of the Mozilla project, pointed to the counterintuitive fact that “instability might drive openness” and that it is up to us to leverage this opportunity, especially because, as Liv Marte Nordhaug from the DPGA summarized, “we have to move fast, because things are being broken.”
It was with that provocation that the conversation shifted to open infrastructure. My brilliant colleague Monica Granados brought in an ecology metaphor to her framing of the infrastructure of commons, which allowed for both some humorous metaphor-building and, ultimately, a greater understanding of the moment that faces us. When the wolves in Yellowstone were extirpated due to unregulated hunting practices, there were a number of negative knock-on effects in the ecosystem: their prey grew in population, which led to overgrazing, erosion, and a negative impact on smaller mammals that otherwise relied on a careful balance in the natural habitat.
What would happen to the commons if the wolves of open infrastructure—open organizations like us—were to disappear? (P.S. careful reintroduction of and support of wolves, through intervention and regulation, has rebalanced conditions in Yellowstone.)
The conversation focused on bridging policies and practice. What is the flexibility afforded by working in the open? What are some of the commercial realities and challenges of building and maintaining infrastructure that can endure? And how do our definitions need to shift in this moment? Kaitlin Thaney from Invest in Open Infrastructure discussed that the definitions landscape is shifting from “ideological to pragmatic.” Instead of getting stuck in strict definitions, we’re better served by thinking about bigger picture challenges and what broader conceptions of openness can enable.
Yael Elmatad of OpenAthena reflected that there is a certain “safety in openness,” while Ellie Bertani of GitLab Foundation said that one perspective is to consider “value captured from, versus value delivered to” when we think about how new tools are built. If we build on open foundations, we stand the best chance of democratized access and shared innovation. At the same time, builders have to remain competitive, and open infrastructure must be acknowledged. Jan Gerlach from the Wikimedia Foundation spoke in-depth about a “crisis of attribution” in this moment. This lack of recognition for open foundations was repeated as a concern throughout the day. As Jan says, “This is what a sustainability crisis looks like.”
In fact, matters of attribution were echoed in the panel on open data, led by Angela Oduor Lungati of Ushahidi. Here, we were reminded that openness is never just a technical question but rather about the communities, contexts, and people behind the data. These realities on the ground are frequently overlooked but must be considered if we are to build holistic data governance policies at any level.
E.M. Lewis-Jong of the Mozilla Data Collective spoke of the need for “a stack of interventions to guard public benefit of data,” as Chris Lewis of Public Knowledge lamented that “people are locking down every way they can.” Jane Anderson of Local Contexts spoke of uses of Indigenous data that showed a complete disregard for provenance and respectful reuse, because “what gets built has consequences.” Promisingly, there are efforts underway in the community to rebalance power.
From CC’s perspective, we continue to believe that we must balance meaningful access and reuse rights with responsible stewardship and public benefit. There is no single solution that will suit all data sharing because not all needs are the same. The importance of grounding the open infrastructure we build in local languages, cultural contexts, and open practices, all of which enable genuine participation, are not optional add-ons to our digital infrastructure—they must be considered a core part of it. Open practices can help us resist digital homogenization and make space for a digital future that reflects the diversity of the people who inhabit it.
I would like to believe that we can all agree that we should not have to translate ourselves into someone else’s language, culture, or worldview to participate in a digital future.
The open source panel reminded attendees how we’re collectively beholden to market forces that shape the systems we use every day but also, conversely, how open source can help shape markets and shift the types of systems we use as part of our daily public infrastructure. The biggest hindrance may simply be usability and preference for simplicity, but panelists reflected that this may come at the expense of privacy considerations and shared benefit. Amanda Cesari from Google Open Source reframed the challenges of an influx of low-effort contributions faced by moderators of Github for example as “low quality contributions at scale,” which could just be called spam, plus the observation about the growing burden this puts on maintainers who lack proper review tooling. The line of the day from Duane O’Brien of the Open Source Initiative summed up a consistent undercurrent: “Open by itself does very little but enables a lot.”
These conversations reinforced something that as a movement we need to carry forward in our case for openness: digital sovereignty is not achieved by owning more of the technology we depend on but rather by having meaningful agency over it and the capacity to exercise that agency over time. I recently finished reading Cory Doctorow’s latest book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. In it, he repeats the following question several times (paraphrased): When it comes to technology, we need to ask who is it doing things for and who is it doing things to?
For us, as a movement, as a patchwork quilt of communities with overlapping belief structures, we have to keep publicly asking the question until there’s a good answer: Who sustains the commons? If openness is one of the building blocks of digital sovereignty, then we have to build the conditions that allow open resources to exist, evolve, and endure. While we have made gains, one of the reasons that open alternatives haven’t become a more substantial part of our digital infrastructure is that openness does not automatically come with a sustainability model for support. All of us benefit enormously from shared resources, but collectively, and as societies, we have not built the institutions, financing, or public commitments that are needed to sustain them.
We cannot expect voluntary efforts alone to sustain openness while treating it as a basic principle of digital sovereignty.
The open web is incredible, but its vulnerabilities are increasingly clear. Open source software is rightly celebrated as a foundation of digital sovereignty, but we still fail to properly reward maintainers. The people who maintain open source software are still too often expected to do so without the resources or recognition their work requires. Open infrastructure projects can become dependent on philanthropic funding or on the priorities of a particular government or administration. And the open knowledge movement shows that even the most valuable public goods—the actual critical knowledge infrastructure of the web—are vulnerable when the people and institutions behind them are not recognized and cannot be sustained.
Projects like Wikipedia reveal fragile dependencies. They demonstrate the extraordinary value of shared knowledge, but that value depends on communities of contributors, editors, and donors and on the continued ability to support the work that keeps such resources alive. The conversations during our event showed that these are not peripheral concerns but rather the key questions about the resilience of our digital foundations.
Our uncritical dependence on these under-resourced open communities deserves just as much attention as our dependence on centralized technology providers. If we want open systems to provide durable alternatives, then maintainers, shared infrastructure, and open knowledge need to be part of our policy discussions and particularly our public funding strategies. We cannot talk about digital sovereignty as a matter of choice and control without also talking about the responsibility to sustain the resources that make those choices possible.
This event was part of the Road to Geneva, and a more deliberate effort amongst organizations with shared priorities to collaborate on a larger stage. This time around, we brought together advocates, technologists, and civil society leaders. We need to expand the forum to include builders, policymakers, and funders.
We want a future where openness is not simply an aspiration, but a sustainable practice. Where collaboration expands our choices rather than creating new dependencies. And where digital sovereignty is measured not just by what a country can control but by the meaningful choices available to people, communities, and institutions.
If we can build better alignment amongst our shared agendas, we stand to have greater collective impact. As we head into the Geneva AI Summit next June, the team at CC will be doing what we can to help build a more unified agenda for openness and the commons.
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