Open technology isn’t just reshaping software; it’s transforming how people learn, work and innovate from open-source communities to global AI collaboration. Hear from Amanda Brock, CEO, OpenUK, who presented at the WSO2 Oxygenate event about how shared innovation can power skills, growth and digital sovereignty for the future.
What can organisations achieve with open technology?
What we see with open source in its purest form is that it gives you the opportunity to take the software and maintain it yourself, if you have the skill set, while also building add-ons to implement it in the way you want for your organisation. It should give you a lot of freedom, but it won’t give you that if you don’t have the skills.
It also allows for employee development. What we see is employees joining communities where their employer has an interest and being able to learn on the job from those communities. The more they engage, the more they learn; the more they build influence on projects; and the better the outcome for the company.
When we talk about open technology, we’re also talking about AI – including data. You have the ability to create standardised approaches to your data to ensure that the data will be transferable and interoperable across different landscapes. Across the breadth, there are different kinds of benefits depending on the technology.
Open UK is all about UK leadership and global collaboration. Can you share any examples, perhaps of how international partnerships have enhanced the UK’s position in open technology?
The ability to collaborate has allowed global innovation that is adopted at scale and has become the best innovation that’s out there – it’s underlying our infrastructure today. The UK benefits from those brilliant minds coming together to create software. Individual engineers build answers to their own challenges and understand that the entire industry has these same challenges. For the UK, it’s enabled us to have Europe’s biggest community of software engineers contributing to open-source projects.
The reason we are not an industry organisation based on company membership is that many of those individuals work for companies across the globe. Whilst they contribute over 27% of our digital gross value add, which is a huge amount for the UK, they are often internationally employed, so we’d not have anywhere near a representative group of company members if we focused on local companies, not people. There was a very interesting blog post from Mark Zuckerberg talking about how Meta has shifted the way it employs people. He was looking at open-source projects Meta uses, seeing who was making the key contributions and then employing them wherever they are based.
We’re seeing a lot of countries talking about sovereignty, particularly the EU, and about closing its borders to US tech and instead trying to build its own stack. The challenge is that you can’t build a stack today that isn’t on one of the big techs’ software without using open-source software. However, as soon as you start to use open source, you’re back at that globally collaborative community, and it’s not European software; it’s global software.
Despite recognising that open source is a cornerstone of all sovereignty, they seem to want local source, not open source, and that’s counterintuitive to the global collaboration at the heart of our open-source ecosystem.
Your background combines law and technology. How has that shaped the way that you, as a person, lead and influence OpenUK?
It means that I straddle a couple of things. I found my tribe when I started working in open source – I love that side of technology. My legal background has allowed me to do policy work because I have spent 25+ years honing my skills. I started working on internet law 25 years ago and learned a lot about how to create laws that work for technology. The ability to take my skills into an open project and then collaborate around that with other legal and technical experts has really shaped our outputs. What we’ve done is become an industry and a policy organisation, where in other countries those are split into two.
I think this combination is critical because you have to give the community a voice. That was also part of our understanding that we should focus on people, not local companies. Had I not come through that open-source company and community background, I wouldn’t understand the patterns, the policy and direction of travel, in the way that I do. This has really shaped our work and allowed us to be one of the organisations that shape the direction of travel where many other organisations have policy and research folks without the technical and practical experience. We do get pushback sometimes from people telling me you’re going in the wrong direction – ‘you’re too focused on companies’, or ‘you’re too focused on communities’. But usually, it is well received and something that enables us to shape OpenUK and build.
What advice would you give to tech leaders who are willing to embrace open technology?
The starting point is to get a basic understanding. For example, understanding the legal definition of open source is important because it really matters. Open source is dependent on the free flow of code without licensing restrictions. Understanding how commercial restrictions are being added to licences to stop them from being open source and the way that the adoption of code licensed in this way creates a risk to the ecosystems is really important. You also have to unlearn a lot of what you’re taught in other traditional environments to really begin to understand open source. For example, you’re going to be collaborating with your competitors, building relationships and engaging with people with whom you might be at loggerheads; you enter a phase of coopetition rather than competition. Mastering that is an art form.
How you share as well as generate revenue is really critical for the future of open source.
How do you envision the role of open technology evolving in the next few years?
It’s really hard to know what’s going to happen in the next three weeks, let alone three years in tech today, partly thanks to AI. We’ve been in situations before where the pace of change has been dramatic – the internet, the introduction of smartphones and devices – and we’re back in that now with AI. AI is just a tool, and it’s a tool that humanity should be controlling rather than being controlled by. If AI is channelled well, it will improve productivity and reduce the number of man-hours we all have to sit working.
That’s something that will create a societal shift. A societal shift happened with smartphones, where we’re controlled by them, constantly on them and constantly replying to people – always accessible. That happened because we didn’t think about the social and human impact of the tool and allowed those designing services to do this in a way that was good for business rather than people.
This new AI technology has to be managed properly to ensure that it doesn’t end up controlling us, and we must learn from the past. The scale and drama of AI demand a focus on how we make it work. It will affect every part of our lives in the future: family, workplace, education, economics, politics and more. There’s going to be a huge socioeconomic impact that has to be grappled with by political and public leadership. For our futures with AI to be well managed, we need to trust it, and that requires transparency of the tools and data, which can only be delivered through openness.
