Skip to main content
This publication is operated by Open Future. Open Future is a think tank that develops new approaches to an open internet that maximise societal benefits of shared data, knowledge and culture.
About Open Future
At Open Future, we shape today’s digital policies with tomorrow’s challenges in mind. Our think tank develops new approaches to an open internet that maximize the societal benefits of shared data, knowledge, and culture. We put our knowledge and experience to work along EU institutions and civil society to ensure that the principle of openness is reflected in the European Union’s digital policy framework.
We recognize that in today’s digital landscape, openness both poses challenges to concentrations of power and, paradoxically, empowers them. This is what we call the Paradox of Open. Our mission is to reimagine and reframe openness by tackling power-related issues and addressing the imbalances it can create. To this end, our team develops civil society strategies and policies for cultivating Digital Commons. As part of our dedication to digital rights and the protection of Europe’s digital sovereignty, we champion the concept of the Digital Public Space. It is an ecosystem built on Public Digital Infrastructures that are democratically and sustainably governed. Our vision is to create a space where digital resources serve the public interest and democratic principles are upheld.
About this publication
This publication contains a selection of our publications with a special focus on texts that are still evolving and for which we are looking for feedback. You can find all our publications on our main website www.openfuture.eu.
SH
Published: Jun 11, 2024
This report captures learnings from the Alignment Assembly on AI and the Commons, a six-week online deliberation of open movement activists, creators, and organizations about regulating generative AI.
AS
Published: Jun 06, 2024
The report reviews academic and “grey” literature on Open Data to identify key ethical issues and potential harm that collecting and processing such data in the context of climate action might raise.
Published: May 16, 2024
This paper explores what compliance policies for Article 53(1c) of the AI Act could look like in practice and what technical standards and services are available to implement the rightholder opt-outs.
BM
DS
Published: Apr 08, 2024
This paper, which has been informed by a series of workshop discussions, maps possible paths to building a books data commons and outlines key questions relevant to developers, repositories, and other potential stakeholders.
Published: Mar 21, 2024
This white paper proposes an approach to sharing data sets for AI training as a public good, governed as a commons.
CP
Published: Feb 12, 2024
The report focuses on unpacking the European Union’s policy approach to Internet standardization and proposes alternative strategies conducive to more openness, both at the technical and political levels.
Published: Oct 17, 2023
This paper takes a close look at digital rights, examining them as a framework playing a role in shaping the dynamics of online ecosystems. It considers the feasibility of a holistic rights-based approach to building genuine digital public spaces.
KS
Published: Sep 21, 2023
Krzysztof Siewicz, an Open Future 2023 fellow, looks into the regulatory requirements and potential challenges of establishing the European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund. Krzysztof’s work was supported by funding from Omidyar Network.
KG
JK
Published: Jul 06, 2023
One of our goals at Open Future is to make sense of openness and the movement advancing this principle. To this end, we have conducted an exploratory mapping of the movement using network analysis methods and data collected from Twitter.
AJ
Published: Jun 07, 2023
Research report based on interviews with digital activists and open movement leaders
Published: Apr 07, 2023
In this document, we collect questions delineating the field of research and activism that we refer to as "Openness and AI."
KF
Published: Feb 07, 2023
The RAIL licenses are gaining ground, but permissive sharing is still the prominent norm governing the sharing of ML models on huggingface.co. This analysis aims at understanding how licenses are used by developers making ML model-related code and or data publicly available.
Published: Dec 16, 2022
This white paper identifies the need for a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund as an instrument for building out Digital Public Spaces in Europe.
Published: Sep 28, 2022
A white paper on understanding the implications of face recognition training with CC-licensed photographs
Published: Sep 09, 2022
These notes offer an initial analysis of a growing movement that strives to make key machine learning tools and technologies open and shared.
Published: Sep 29, 2021
This is a preprint of a book chapter, to be published in: Alexander Baratsits (ed.), European Public Spheres, Digitisation and Public Welfare Orientation.
FR
Published: Sep 21, 2021
White-paper outlining the concept for a public repository of public domain and openly licensed works.
Published: Mar 05, 2021
In today’s digital environment, openness serves as both a challenge to concentrations of power and its enabler. Solving this paradox is at the heart of our work, which focuses on three objectives.
Published: May 14, 2021
Introducing the concept of generative interoperability - a design principle that has the potential to build a more decentralized infrastructure that enables individual self-determination in the online environment.
