I gave a talk on Saturday at Open Institute V2 in Madeira, which had the theme of "Open in a Time of Closure" --

Many of the ideals for 'open' in the last two decades are facing dramatic retrogression. The open Internet is under incredible threat and is already lost in much of the world. Borders are closing in the West; the negative impacts of the closed scientific/academic publication system are becoming clearer; public speech and transparency are suffering throughout the world. Meanwhile, governments are imprisoning principled practitioners of agonistic openness like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Texas native Reality Winner with a vigor not shown since the enlightenment. How do the last few years’ challenge or reinforce the need for openness? What have we learned about closure?

You can read more here: https://openinstitute.m-iti.org/

I focused mostly on themes and tactics for facilitating and supporting open networks of community-centric technology development, as we've been doing at Public Lab over the past few years. I think the video will be posted (which will have more than my slides, as I talked a lot and they aren't text-heavy) but here are the slides themselves!

In particular, I spoke about a short list of strategies we've been building on in the past couple years:

• recognize / respect different forms of expertise
• using language as a tool
• demystifying
• modularity
• strong empiricism
• welcoming newcomers
• equity

I also added a few sketches, like the lead image and this one: