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An earlier account of the symposium

was published under a CC BY 4.0 license

on the Creative Commons blog on September 30, 2026, and audio recordings and full transcripts

of four of the day's sessions are available

from the Engelberg Center.

We are at a critical moment to elevate the discussions around openness and the commons into public dialogue as we try to steer AI development to serve the public interest.

Openness is hailed as a panacea for digital sovereignty. Recently, leading experts, practitioners, and builders convened for a day of conversation about the collaborative underpinnings of openness, investigating every layer of the technology stack to achieve a shared understanding of what openness can — and cannot — do to help communities and nations drive towards digital sovereignty.

Clear throughlines emerged from the convening:

• Openness creates choices

• Sovereignty depends on our ability to exercise and sustain those choices

• Sustaining the people, institutions, and shared resources that make openness possible must be part of any sensible sovereignty strategy

Openness Alone is Not a Sovereignty Strategy

The day started with a simple proposition: that openness and digital sovereignty are deeply intertwined, but openness alone is not a sovereignty strategy. Digital sovereignty centers on our ability to make meaningful choices about the digital systems on which we depend. Openness helps create those choices by offering the freedom to inspect, adapt, share, collaborate, and perhaps most importantly, move away from systems that no longer serve us. If we ground our definition of digital sovereignty in agency, then it lets us see this not as a path to doing everything alone, but a path to have options, centering collaboration. However, these freedoms only translate into sovereignty when we have the capacity to exercise them. Infrastructure, skills, governance, and resources are all required to make those choices real.

Rather than assuming digital sovereignty means doing everything alone, countries and communities must build capacity together. One panelist spoke of “strategic interdependence” in this moment — a mindset that leverages shared resources and middle-power collaboration to expand options. This is a catalytic moment for openness, and the window of opportunity is unique and urgent, to stave off further fracturing of public interest values from the technology that many of our lives run on.

Attendees follow a session at OPEN @ UNGA 81, NYU Engelberg Center, New York, September 21, 2026. Photo by Anna Tumadóttir, CC BY 4.0

The Sustainability Crisis of Open Infrastructure

It warrants asking ourselves: what happens to the commons if the foundational pillars of open infrastructure were to disappear? What would be the knock-on effects?

In practice, the landscape surrounding open infrastructure is shifting from ideological debates to pragmatic necessities. While building on open foundations offers the best chance for democratized access and shared innovation, builders must remain competitive, and open infrastructure must be recognized. The crisis of sustainability is closely linked to the crisis of attribution, which Creative Commons is focused on and that our long-time allies at the Wikimedia Foundation have been raising the alarm on. Essentially, when open foundations lack proper recognition and support, the entire system becomes unstable.

The same need for recognition and support extends directly to open data. Openness is never just a technical question but rather about the communities, contexts, and people behind the data. Holistic data governance requires safeguarding public benefits, respecting provenance and cultural contexts, and preventing unbalanced exploitation of knowledge and culture across the spectrum. Real participation demands that we ground our digital infrastructure in local languages and cultural diversity, ensuring that no one has to translate themselves into someone else’s worldview to participate in digital life.

Market Forces and the Reality of Maintenance

The open source movement demonstrates how we are collectively beholden to market forces that shape everyday systems, while also proving that open source can actively shape markets and redefine digital public infrastructure.

However, significant barriers remain. Usability preferences and convenience often take precedence over privacy and shared benefits when folks make individual choices. Adding insult to injury, maintainers have long received little in return for what is frequently volunteer labor, and now are overwhelmed by low-quality contributions to open source projects.

Some frame digital sovereignty as a matter for the state, centered on national control of digital infrastructure. However, digital sovereignty is not achieved merely by owning more technology but by having meaningful agency over it and the capacity to exercise that agency over time, including the freedom to move away from systems that no longer serve us. In his latest book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow repeatedly asks (paraphrased): When it comes to technology, we need to ask who is it doing this for and who is it doing things to?

This isn’t simply a matter of “open” or “closed.” It is about how to build sustainable openness, compatible with community governance, the stewardship of the commons, all powered by varied forms of reciprocity.

Who Sustains the Commons?

As a movement across diverse communities with overlapping belief structures, we must keep asking a fundamental question until we get a satisfactory answer: Who sustains the commons? 

If openness is a foundational building block of digital sovereignty, we must actively build the conditions that allow open resources to exist, evolve, and endure. While we have made tremendous gains, open alternatives often lack an embedded sustainability model. Society benefits enormously from shared resources, yet we have failed to build the institutions, financing, and public commitments necessary to sustain them.

We cannot expect voluntary efforts alone to sustain openness while treating it as a basic principle of digital sovereignty.

• The open web is incredible, but its vulnerabilities are increasingly apparent.

• Open source software is celebrated as a foundation of digital sovereignty, yet we routinely fail to properly reward its maintainers with the resources or recognition their work requires.

• Open infrastructure projects remain perpetually vulnerable to shifting priorities of philanthropic funding or political administrations.

• Essential public knowledge goods are imperiled when the people and institutions behind them cannot be sustained.

Projects like Wikipedia reveal fragile dependencies. Their extraordinary value relies entirely on communities of contributors, editors, and donors and on the continued ability to support the work that keeps such resources alive. These are not peripheral concerns; they are core questions about the resilience of our digital foundations.

Uncritical dependence on underresourced open communities deserves just as much scrutiny as our dependence on centralized technology providers. If we want open systems to provide durable alternatives, maintainers, shared infrastructure, and open knowledge must be integrated directly into policy discussions and public funding strategies. We cannot talk about digital sovereignty as a matter of choice and control without addressing the responsibility to sustain the resources that make those choices possible.

A Path Forward

To achieve a sustainable future, we must expand our forums to include policymakers, funders, and builders alike. We want a future where openness is not simply an aspiration, but a sustainable practice. Where collaboration expands our choices rather than creating new dependencies. Where digital sovereignty is measured not just by control but by the meaningful choices available to people, communities, and institutions.

By building better alignment amongst our shared agendas, we can achieve greater collective impact. As we look toward major international AI forums and policy convenings, like the Geneva AI Summit in 2027, the path forward requires a unified agenda for openness and the commons - ensuring that the infrastructure we all rely on is finally supported, recognized, and sustained.

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