‘Open’ is the new digital

Our world is one transformed by the digital. Modern digital technologies have changed the way we listen to music, the way we watch films and television, the way we read books and increasingly, the way we learn and interact with each other. Those structures and organisations that seemed so firmly established – businesses, healthcare or education – seem increasingly fragile. Each attempting to adapt and find ways of flourishing in this new digital environment.

Evermore, the creation and consumption of digital information is taking place on or through the web, cementing the digital into our lives. Emerging from this digitally transformed landscape are new and evolving concepts. In an environment wrought by change, ideas are flourishing and have growing significance.

Open is an example of a concept that is flourishing. Take open source software, it has been part of our vocabulary since the birth of the internet, but has successfully adapted to a changing environment to become a key player within the software industry. The list of open source applications, operating systems, languages and software is huge, and amongst them is software dominant in its market - Linux, Wordpress, Moodle, Android, Mozilla Firefox, to name a few. Open source has taken advantage of the technical, economic and social changes of our digital age.

The example of open source demonstrates that open is not an abstract concept in industries such as software development, publishing or, come to think to it, just about any other enterprise.

Education shows us how open is fundamentally changing the way teaching, learning and research take place. Crowdsourcing and peer production are transforming the research process and open access to research publications is changing the academic communications landscape, as well as opening up academic content to everyone. Open courses such as MOOCs are threatening to challenge the physical space of the university and college, or at the very least, challenge its dominance. The impact of open on education could be crudely stated along the following lines: knowledge that has traditionally been encased in physical buildings is being opened up to everyone.

Using open is increasingly becoming an economic and social requirement for universities and colleges. Transforming student interactions, business models and the very process of undertaking and sharing research.

Open is about freedom: the freedom to access, use, collaborate on and even modify the content of something, through appropriate licensing (the most well-known being the open licences from Creative Commons, such as CC-0). The creation of open artefacts (such as scholarly articles, code, data or even hardware) usually comes with a cost, so open doesn’t mean free of charge. Rather, it recognises the value of collaboration with peers, re-use of information and the sharing of digital content once the material is open. Overall this is a relatively low-cost activity and worth the long term benefits.

These ideas are exemplified in The Open Book, which is the third part of the Finnish Institute's 'Reaktio' Series, published with the help of The Open Knowledge Foundation and edited by Jussi Nissilä, Kaitlyn Braybrooke and Timo Vuorikivi.

The Open Book is a crowdsourced, multi-authored book that aims to provide a snapshot of a moment in time when the movement for openness, and in particular open knowledge, is reaching a high point. The book is purposely wide ranging in its subject matter, spanning domains and types of open, from open data and open design to journalism and urban planning. The aim is to provide a bird’s-eye view over an open explosion as the radius of its blast steadily increases and to show the power of open in places not usually associated with the concept, such as sustainability or government spending.

But the book also invites a different type of engagement from its readers. As an open book it asks the reader to be a participant and a collaborator, to share, copy, re-use, mix and re-mix, to be inspired, provoked and use it as a starting point for something more. As Rufus Pollock, co-founder and director of The Open Knowledge Foundation, says in the afterword, ultimately the success of openness rests on the ingenuity and cunning of those who develop services and new business models or derive value from the data, code, content and so forth. This not happening is the greatest risk to the ongoing success of open as a movement. A transformation that may be as important as that brought about through digital technologies.

The Open Book aims to mark the beginnings of open’s emergence as a force in its own right, not simply as a consequence or accident of the digital age. To highlight the changes it is bringing to disparate domains and sectors, from engineering to education and beyond.

Might open be a product of the digital age that proves to be the saviour of a digital open future?