Author(s): Nicholas Gates (Senior Policy Director, OpenForum Europe)
At 14:00 CET on 19 March 2026 – the same day as the Asia Pacific session – the second of three Open Technology Reserach global consultations brought together a broader and more heterogeneous group: energy system modellers, policy researchers, procurement specialists, civil society advocates, open hardware engineers, and open science practitioners, drawn from across Europe and, to a more limited degree, Africa. The conversation was moderated by Nicholas Gates of OpenForum Europe.
This roundtable was longer, noisier, and at times more contested than its Asia Pacific counterpart. It was a sign of the challenge of building a global and inclusive research agenda in a still-expanding research field with genuine tensions that deserve to be aired. The session covered familiar ground – survey findings, research priorities, infrastructure gaps – but participants also pushed back on the framing itself. Several of the most valuable contributions came not in response to the questions asked but in resistance to them.
Insight #1: The question of what we even mean by “open”
The Europe and Africa consultation was preoccupied with scope. What counts as open technology? Who gets to define it? And whose priorities end up shaping the agenda by default?
Several participants flagged that “openness” is still primarily understood through the lens of software – e.g., the four freedoms, the Open Source Definition – leaving open hardware, open data, and diverse digital commons underrepresented in a research agenda anchored in software. Others pointed out that the open source and open science communities, despite addressing overlapping questions, rarely talk to each other; bridging them was an opportunity to build something more coherent than either could develop alone.
The sharpest challenge came from a participant who argued that the entire framing reflected the priorities of the Global North, largely unreflectively. Are we including seed movements in rural areas, maintaining non-transgenic agricultural diversity as a form of open hardware? Offline data engineering in the Global South? Open infrastructure in the mining and energy sectors that are mission-critical to the dependency relationships between North and South?
The network’s current conceptualisation is biased towards the measurable and the definable — licensing, standardisation, metrics — and addressing that bias needs to be an explicit part of the agenda-setting process if OTR is to move beyond what was done through the OpenForum Academy.
Insight #2: Governance in a new era
If the Asia Pacific session was most animated by procurement, the Europe and Africa consultation kept returning to governance – and to the sense that the challenges facing open technology today are qualitatively different from those of a decade ago.
One researcher offered a framing that resonated across the room: that open technology is now in a third stage of development – from community-driven free software, through deep corporate involvement in open source, to the current moment in which open technology has become foundational infrastructure, with governments participating as active, strategic actors. This creates governance challenges that the existing research literature is not well equipped to address: what does governance look like when communities, companies, and governments are all co-participants in the same systems?
Related questions followed. How do you measure technological sovereignty in ways that are trackable across jurisdictions and useful for evaluating public investment? What does it mean to make open hardware a “reference technology” for public infrastructure – and who governs that decision? Two participants independently flagged the absence of a clear definition of an open standard and the lack of licensing frameworks suited to that context. These are not abstract problems. They are barriers practitioners encounter daily and that researchers have barely begun to address.
Insight #3: The gap between research and policy – and what to do about it
A theme that ran through the latter part of the session was the structural misalignment between the timelines of academic research and the windows available for policy influence. A participant from a policy think tank put it plainly: a typical European policy process opens a consultation window of six months to a year, then accelerates rapidly. Academic research operates on different rhythms – papers take years to produce and publish. The result is that researchers often have valuable insights but cannot deliver them in formats that policymakers can use at the moment they are needed.
The solution, she suggested, is not just to ask researchers to work faster, but to help them understand what shorter or more diverse formats for making research accessible might look like. Policy briefs, rapid evidence reviews, contributions to consultation processes: these are skills that can be taught, but they require researchers to be connected to policy communities in ways that many currently are not. This is, again, an infrastructure problem – and one that the network may be well-positioned to address.
Several participants echoed this by calling for a closer integration of researchers and practitioners in the agenda-setting process itself. Rather than developing a research agenda from within the academic community and then presenting it to practitioners, the suggestion was to start from where practitioners are: identifying the specific, concrete barriers they encounter and working backwards to the research questions that could help address them.
Insight #4: Importance of representation and diversity
The call had a significant bias towards male participants and towards people based in Europe. A wider range of women and Africa-based participants had signed up than were ultimately present on the call. That gap matters, and it was not lost on those who were there, so more follow-up will be needed to ensure the representation of different backgrounds and communities.
A participant representing an African open research infrastructure organisation was direct: the fact that Africa was represented by only a handful of voices was itself a data point. When we talk about open technologies, we need to be intentional about ensuring that communities from Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are not treated as peripheral recipients of knowledge generated elsewhere – but as sources of questions, methods, and insights that the rest of the world needs. The network’s ambition to be global is real, but ambition is not the same as practice.
Another participant made a related point about gender. Open technology research consistently fails to disaggregate its findings by gender, and consistently fails to examine how the dynamics of open communities – contribution, recognition, maintenance, governance – play out differently for women than for men.
————————————————————————————————–
Open Technology Research will publish a consolidated summary of findings across all three regional consultations ahead of the release of the draft research agenda in April 2026. The findings from the Asia Pacific region were released on Monday, and the findings from the Americas will be released on Friday. To stay informed or to share additional input, sign up for the OTR mailing list at opentechresearch.org. And if you have additional input from the Europe and Africa regions, please make sure to continue sharing it via our survey form, which remains open.