Open Future Annual Report 2024
Open Future’s Annual Report 2024 covers our activities from January 1 to December 31, 2024—our fourth full year of operation and the final year of our four-year grant from Arcadia Fund. We are making this report–originally produced for our funders as part of our regular reporting–publicly available as part of our commitment to openness and transparency.
The report provides a detailed account of our organizational strategy, including our three core objectives and achievements in each area, along with insights into how we have developed and refined our approach.
A major highlight of our work in 2024 was securing a grant from the European Commission, together with four partners, to develop an EU Public repository of public domain and openly licensed works, based on the vision from a 2021 white paper we wrote on the topic. The CommonsDB project will form the foundation of a new line of work on copyright infrastructure that we launched in early 2025.
Another highlight has been strengthening our collaboration with organizations across the Open Movement to explore shared advocacy agendas. This included working with Creative Commons, Open Knowledge, and Wikimedia on an advocacy agenda for the commons; organizing the Alignment Assembly on AI and the Commons with Creative Commons; designing a new Knowledge Sharing advocacy agenda with SPARC Open; and exploring the intersection of Open Data, data sharing, and open-source AI development with the Open Source Initiative.
Finally, our work on the interaction between the EU copyright framework and the AI Act, adopted in early 2024, continues to make an impact. We have been able to frame the discussions about implementing TDM opt-outs and the required level of training data transparency by being among the first stakeholders to publish substantive contributions on considerations for opt-out policies and the forthcoming transparency template.
In 2024, we proposed six policy interventions for strengthening EU support for Digital Commons and developing European Public Digital Infrastructures. Several of these proposals—including those on a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund, on a public option for AI, and other aspects of Public Digital Infrastructure policies—had an impact on policy debates about European digital infrastructure.
