Building the Commons in an Age of Institutions

For decades, open source contributors, open data practitioners, and open knowledge communities have built something extraordinary.

They have not only created software, datasets, encyclopedias, standards, and shared infrastructure. They have also developed methods, norms, and governance models for collaboration at scale. That is one of the most important achievements of the open movement, and it deserves far more recognition than it often gets.

Open As a Philosophy

The principles themselves are not new. Open is still grounded in many of the same core ideas as the original free software movement led by Richard Stallman: the ability to inspect, reuse, improve, and build upon what others have made. It means collaborating on software with transparency down to every reported issue, every bug, and every pull request.

It is about interoperability over lock-in, commons over silos, and long-term stewardship over short-term control.

In that sense, open is about more than licenses. It is a philosophy of how knowledge, infrastructure, and institutions should work in a healthy society. Open source, open data, open access, and open standards are not separate ideas. They are connected expressions of the same belief: that society becomes more resilient, transparent, and innovative when more people can participate, contribute, and learn.

This is why openness matters not only for developers, but for democracy. Open systems make it easier to inspect how things work, reduce dependency on closed platforms, and create room for local ownership and adaptation. They help build digital commons instead of digital monopolies. They strengthen trust, autonomy, and public accountability.

That is also why it is worth pausing to appreciate what open communities have actually accomplished over the last three decades.

What Open Communities Built

Linux is one of the best-known examples. Today, it runs on everything from servers and cloud infrastructure to mobile phones, routers, smart TVs, industrial systems, and even household appliances such as washing machines. If we decide to put a woman or a man on the moon, it is very likely that Linux will be part of that journey.

What began as a community-driven software project became a crucial part of the foundation for much of the modern digital economy. Over time, governance and long-term stewardship models evolved around it, with institutions such as the Linux Foundation helping create structures where competitors could collaborate on shared infrastructure.

Linus Torvalds is best known for creating Linux in the early 1990s, but he also created Git, the version control system that has become one of the essential tools of modern software collaboration. Git matters not only because it helps developers manage code, but because it makes large-scale, distributed collaboration more transparent and practical. It allows people to track changes, review contributions, understand how software evolves over time, and work together across institutions, companies, and geographies. If you made even one small contribution to a software project, Git makes sure it is documented.

In many ways, Git is the embodiment of open-source methodology: transparent by design, built for iteration, and structured to make contribution, review, and collective improvement possible at scale.

What makes this especially striking is the breadth of support behind these ecosystems. The Linux Foundation is backed by a wide range of major private-sector actors, including some of the world's largest technology companies. Many of these same companies have also contributed substantially to Kubernetes and to other critical open-source building blocks around cloud, infrastructure, security, and developer tooling. Companies that compete fiercely in the market still invest in shared open infrastructure because they understand that some layers are more valuable as commons than as closed proprietary assets.

Outside software, Wikimedia and Creative Commons show how the logic of openness can scale far beyond code. Wikimedia demonstrated that people around the world are willing to contribute knowledge to a shared resource at an extraordinary scale. Creative Commons helped make sharing legally understandable and practically possible across culture, research, education, media, and public information. Together, these movements helped turn openness from a niche ideal into a global practice.

This is no longer only about technology and software. Researchers, artists, educators, and creators of many different kinds are increasingly contributing by sharing what they make. As a result, the amount of material released into the open commons has grown dramatically over time.

This is the part I believe deserves praise: not only the outputs, but the culture and methodology. Open communities have spent decades learning how to govern shared resources, how to lower the threshold for contribution, how to coordinate across institutions, and how to create value that many different actors can build on.

The Institutional Paradox

And yet, this is where an uncomfortable paradox appears.

In the development sector, many UN organizations, NGOs, and public institutions still struggle to collaborate at anything close to the level open-source communities have achieved. These are deeply mission-driven institutions that often share overlapping goals and work on problems that clearly require common infrastructure, shared knowledge, and long-term cooperation. And yet, in practice, collaboration is often fragmented, project-based, and constrained by institutional incentives.

I see this especially clearly in the climate and nature space, which is where I work on a daily basis. Here, the need for shared digital commons is obvious. Data, standards, tools, and knowledge often have far more value when they are stewarded openly and improved collectively. But too often, institutions still work in parallel rather than together, even when their missions are closely aligned.

In some ways, large technology companies have become better at collaborating on shared open building blocks than many public-interest institutions have.

That should give us pause. Because this is not only a technical gap. It is also a coordination problem.

A kind of prisoner's dilemma. Each institution may see rational reasons to protect its own processes, platforms, funding streams, visibility, or control. Each project may optimize for its own short-term deliverables. Each organization may fear that if it shares too much, it gives away advantage without getting enough in return. These choices are understandable in isolation.

But the collective result is worse for everyone.

Instead of building stronger shared infrastructure, we duplicate work. Instead of improving common building blocks together, we reproduce silos. Instead of creating ecosystems that others can contribute to and build upon, we create parallel efforts with weak interoperability and limited long-term stewardship. This is often true even for projects that call themselves digital public goods.

This is precisely where the open movement still has something important to teach us.

A Greenfield Opportunity

The deeper lesson of open source is not just that code can be shared. It is that collaboration can be designed. Institutions can create rules, licenses, norms, technical standards, and governance models that make cooperation more attractive, more sustainable, and more effective than isolation.

That is why I think this moment should be seen not only as a challenge, but as a greenfield opportunity.

There is a real opportunity to bring the maturity of open-source thinking into climate, nature, public-interest technology, and international cooperation more broadly. Not by copying software culture mechanically, but by adapting its best lessons: shared stewardship, open standards, reusable public goods, transparent governance, and contribution models that allow many actors to participate meaningfully.

The principles of openness have not changed. But the tech landscape has.

Today, the question is not whether openness works. We already know that it does. The question is whether more of our public-interest institutions are ready to take openness seriously not only as a value statement, but as an operating model.

If they do, the potential is enormous.

Because open is not only about how we build software. It is also about how we build the commons.