Convening public benefit and charitable foundations working in open domains (OSI blog)

Over on the Open Source Initiative (OSI) blog, the organization has announced the Open Policy Alliance (OPA), which is meant to bring together various non-profit organizations to help educate and inform US policy makers about open-source software and its needs:

The need to create such a program is more urgent today due to the rise of new regulations in the software industry and adjacent open domains around the world. Cyber security, the societal impact of AI, data and privacy are important issues for legislators globally. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic drove collaborative development to unprecedented levels and took Open Source software, open research, open content and data from mainstream to main stage. Moving forward, developing these important public policies whilst not harming the ecosystem requires an understanding of how the Open Source ecosystem works. Ensuring stakeholders without historic benefit of representation are included in those discussions becomes paramount to that end.

The OPA will focus on educating public policy makers on Open Source to inform their development and deliberation of new policy concepts. There are unintended consequences that come from a lack of understanding of how open collaboration works in practice. The OPA will address this as well as the historic absence of contribution from underrepresented groups. The interest areas of the OPA community will complement those of Digitable Public Goods Alliance, a UNICEF multi-stakeholder initiative with a mission to accelerate the attainment of sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries that OSI joined earlier this year.