Open Models and Digital Commons - Introduction
Open models: Modes of organisation and knowledge production emerging with the digital era based on the free circulation of information and collaboration at an Internet scale which seek to benefit from the interaction between communities and ecosystems of actors (individuals, institutions, organizations, etc.).
Examples of open models: Open Science, Open Education, Open Software, Open Hardware, Open Data, Open Standard…
In the face of contemporary crises humanity will inevitably experience profound changes. Knowledge has always shaped society, from the discovery of fire through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to the recent awareness of environmental challenges. Launched almost a century ago, we are only at the very beginning of the digital revolution that is transforming our relationship with knowledge and information. Open models are seeds of these major shifts in the way we produce and distribute knowledge through digital technologies.
Open models are emerging but already fundamental practices of sharing and collaboration around digital resources that may be used, shared and modified across a variety of domains: software, research material, educational resources, data, hardware, standards, etc. Unlike dominant proprietary or closed approaches based on ownership through copyright, openness is guaranteed through legal frameworks that grant these freedoms, typically through open licenses. These phenomena enable communities to converge around digital commons, resources co-produced under shared governance.
Notable digital commons include the encyclopedia Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux operating system, the database OpenStreetMap, the preprint archive arXiv or the research repository Zenodo, the textbooks platforms LibreTexts or OpenStax — among many others.
Fundamentals of the Digital World
Still relatively unknown, open models already are key components that shape the evolution of our digital world. Every modern application is built using open software with all major tech companies using, producing and collaborating around them. Linux runs 100% of the 500 fastest supercomputers, powers around 60% of the world’s web servers, and Android — also built on Linux — holds around 70% of the mobile market. Open software underpins many technological revolutions including the Internet, the World Wide Web, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and more recently, artificial intelligence through shared software libraries.
The contemporary scientific revolution is becoming increasingly grounded around the principle of open science, encouraged by a vast number of academics and with policies worldwide emerging to support free access to scientific knowledge. In 2021, UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science was adopted unanimously by all 193 member states. Universities are setting up open archives and repositories to publish their research forming the biggest network of digital libraries in human history. Major crises accelerate this shift — during the COVID-19 pandemic, CERN, UNESCO and the World Health Organization launched a joint appeal for open science, and it is increasingly seen as critical in the face of ecological crises.
Open education is gradually transforming the way knowledge is transmitted, extending these principles to teaching and learning. To foster this philosophy in education the UNESCO’s Recommandation on Open Educational Resources was adopted in 2019, encouraging the development of national policies. With the intent to reduce costs and improve accessibility to education, the United States is seeing a rise of Zero Textbook Cost initiatives based on this idea of freely usable and modifiable material. In 2024 in France, the Ministry of National Education launched the Forge of Digital Educational Commons enabling collaboration between teachers at national scale.
The rise of open models is spreading to other fields, their momentum grows continuously leading to numerous societal changes. Yet we still lack mastery of these dynamics; understanding them better is essential to realising their full potential and making wiser use of digital technologies.
Common Laws, Complementary Dynamics
Every openness movement has its own particularities but open models follow common mechanisms. Open collaboration practices are emerging across all these movements becoming increasingly important with the need to develop contribution and governance structures. Open resources face similar legal challenges within existing intellectual property frameworks. With digital commons taking shape in these various fields, complex ecosystems of stakeholders emerge composed of individuals, institutions and/or organisations from both public and private sectors. The production of these resources faces common constraints regarding the software infrastructure required to fully enable collaboration, the explorability of resources becoming also a common issue in these practices. Economic models of a new kind are appearing with this ability to mobilize resources to conduct activities. These openness movements possess a political aspect by leading to the implementation of policies at various levels, whether within an organisation, at national level or within international bodies. We can also see a need for specific skills development running through these dynamics.
We can even observe a similar historical trajectory in their development. First, with the progressive democratization of digital technologies, openness begins with a desire to share resources. Secondly, with the proliferation of resources, converging interests and maturing infrastructures, we are realising and seeking this collaborative potential more fully with the creation of dedicated methodologies. Last but not least, given their pervasive nature coupled with cultural evolution, growing societal awareness of their importance drives efforts to sustain and institutionalise these open models.
More than obeying common laws, these dynamics can be combined to create powerful synergies between open models. Take the example of an open educational resource whose content is based on open access research, relying on open software and open standards to support its dissemination, editability and interoperability. From another perspective, the availability of open source software enables the expansion of infrastructures in open science and open education, facilitating the establishment of resource repositories. Furthermore, open policies in one domain naturally encourage openness in others as the diversity of open science policies will lead to greater acceptance of open education policies while also calling for open software policies to move towards open scholarly infrastructure.
It becomes strategic to think of open models as a coherent whole in which these common laws and complementarities make these phenomena mutually reinforcing.
The Knowledge Base: An Open Models Experiment
This knowledge base sits at the intersection of (popular) education and (citizen) science to support a global understanding and transmission of open models and digital commons. Education on open models is a broad topic taking various forms, the aim is to nurture our general culture while serving as a bridge toward specialized external resources to answer the different needs of people. The intent is to build a theoretical tool to train people, a basis to create educational resources adapted to the multiplicity of contexts, a means to empower a network of trainers and specialists and a way to gather research in order to follow the state of the art in these areas. Its mission is to provide citizens with the knowledge to gain a deeper mastery of digital technologies by grasping these fundamental dynamics!
In the face of these new changes we are all in a learning process. In line with these philosophies, the knowledge base is an exploration of open models by being an open resource looking for collaboration in an effort to shape a new digital commons. All content may be reused, modified and improved, an open source resource with its source files openly available in a dedicated repository (currently on GitHub). You are warmly invited to contribute in a variety of ways to help this project move forward. Open models can only be a collective journey whose success depends on each and every one of us.
Welcome to this world of open models and digital commons to contribute to changes in society ❤️🔥