One of our goals at Open Future is to make sense of openness and the movement advancing this principle. We aim to understand how the achievements of the last two decades can be stewarded and maintained and the new, emergent issues and challenges. We aim to understand shifting strategies and advocacy goals. Finally, we are exploring issues around openness and power imbalances, often raised as a fundamental challenge to openness, as it has been framed in the last two decades.
This work requires understanding openness and its advocates’ shifting goals and strategies. It also requires defining and mapping the open movement. Who is part of this movement, and how is it structured?
To this end, we have conducted two studies in parallel. One of them — the one you are reading — is an exploratory mapping of the movement using network analysis methods and data collected from Twitter. The other is a qualitative survey of open movement leaders, titled “Shifting Tides: the Open Movement at a Turning Point.”
This report presents the results of the mapping study. The first part consists of a definition of the open movement, followed by a conceptualization of the movement as consisting of distinct but connected fields of open. The second part comprises methodological information about social network analysis and data visualization. The third part includes a presentation of the network visualizations and their analysis.
The data visualization work for this study was conducted by panGenerator. Data collection and analysis was done by Alek Tarkowski, Francesco Vogelezang and Kasia Fantoni.
