Open transitions

I've spent most of the last two years as CTO at the OPEN. 

This continued my trend of working with organisations related to 'open,' but confusingly was nothing to do with open at all. OPEN is the Online Progressive Engagement Network, and I think of it as a co-op, although formally it is not. It's a capacity-building and power-building network, funded (in part) by its member organisations, and mostly works behind the scenes. (It was quite a relief not needing to do social/media/event circuit hustle for once!) OPEN's members are each progressive campaign organisations, building mass people-power to create change across multiple issues including human rights, climate change, and so on. They use the internet for scale, and each organisation operates across a whole nation - the "one member per country" rule means OPEN members aren't competing for local funding or membership. (That the organisations are OPEN members, and that they themselves call their supporter base 'members', is indeed confusing.) 

I was the first CTO, and a lot of my work was figuring out what a strategy might look like for tech (software, data, digital, etc) with and for a very diverse stakeholder community. This was a success. We got to a sound strategy which is flexible, adaptable, and sustainable, which offers the best value for the most people, and also takes OPEN and its members to a place where the next generation of campaigning can be considered, planned and pioneered. As OPEN members were often pioneers of the digital technologies they used to achieve scale and impact when they started out, this is particularly important. And with the rise of the far right around the world, connected financially and in other ways, and using the internet in ways the progressive movement would not, there's lots of scope for innovation. The tech work to deliver this strategy is mostly community and capacity building, with a bit of R&D, which sadly isn't a fit with my wish to be working more on engineering activity - which I've been trying to get back to since the start of 2019. So I'm leaving OPEN with a strong strategy and stakeholder support for it, and I look forward to seeing where the global progressive movement goes next! The best part of working at the OPEN was meeting the staff at our member organisations, all pursuing positive change with incredible dedication, sometimes in really challenging circumstances. The diversity of situations, tactics and campaign topics was eye-opening.

I'm also saying farewell to another 'open' organisation this month. In this case it's OpenUK, where I've been on the board for two and a half years. At the start of that time Amanda Brock was setting out to reboot the organisation, and the new board had open data, open software and open hardware representation. Amanda has been a force of nature, getting a range of activities underway, resourced and showcased, all towards a general goal of UK leadership in open technology. It's been fascinating to see how the mission and activities have evolved, as they always do in emergent organisations. Whilst some of the 2022 activities are around topics I'm interested in like sustainability, the general software/cloud focus doesn't feel like something I have much to offer in, and so in rebalancing my commitments this year OpenUK felt like this was something to step back from.

So onto new things shortly!