Author(s): Nicholas Gates (Senior Policy Director, OpenForum Europe)
At 19:00 CET on 19 March 2026, the last of three global OTR consultations took place. This roundtable – with representatives of individuals across the Americas – brought together a notably eclectic group: academics, nonprofit programme evaluators, researchers, civil society, practitioners, and people working on digital public goods. Katie Steen-James of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) facilitated, joined by OSI’s Interim Executive Director Deb Bryant.
The conversation was more intimate than its counterparts earlier in the day – more exploratory, and at times more candid about the practical limits of what can be accomplished. Where the Asia Pacific roundtable surfaced concrete regional priorities, and the Europe and Africa session wrestled with structural and definitional questions, this conversation was more exploratory – at times more candid – about the practical limits of what a research network can and cannot do, and about the specific gaps that participants encounter in their daily work.
Insight #1: The discoverability problem
One of the first observations to land was simple: a significant amount of relevant research already exists, but it can be challenging to find it. One participant put it plainly: they regularly discover, almost by accident, that someone she knows is working on exactly the question she is trying to answer. A project funded by the State Department examining cybersecurity and open source, for example, had crossed their radar only through a chance conversation. How had they not connected over this before?
This is a different kind of gap from the one usually discussed. It is not only that the research does not exist; it is that the research that does exist is scattered, siloed by discipline or sector, and invisible to the people who need it most. The network’s first and most practical contribution, several participants suggested, may simply be to function as a discovery mechanism – a way of making legible what is already being done, before worrying too much about what is not.
Insight #2: Civic engagement, democracy, and the stakes of openness
One of the more distinctive contributions of the Americas session was an explicit argument for connecting open technology research to the broader health of democratic institutions. A researcher working across humanities and social sciences made the case that the importance of open source platforms for civic engagement – for transparency, for public participation, for the kind of infrastructure that democratic society depends on – had been touched on but not directly named in the conversation.
This resonated with others in the room. The open government movement, the question of who controls the platforms through which citizens engage with public institutions, the relationship between open standards and accountability – these are not peripheral concerns. They are, in a political moment where democratic institutions are under pressure across the Americas and beyond, among the most consequential questions the field could address.
One participant also drew a direct line to digital sovereignty, noting the particular charge it was having recently in the Canadian context. Canada, they noted, has woken up sharply to questions of digital sovereignty in the past year, driven by shifts in its international relationships. Open source and open technologies are increasingly being discussed as a core component of a credible sovereignty policy. The research to support that argument, however, does not yet exist in any systematic form.
Insight #3: Translating research into policy – the packaging problem
A thread that ran through the latter part of the session was the challenge of making research usable by policymakers. Deb Bryant framed it directly: the answer to this problem, historically, has been to build a think tank – a body dedicated to translating evidence into language that decision-makers can consume and act on. The combination of researchers and policy practitioners on the call was itself a resource, she suggested; they could help each other understand both what the evidence shows and how to package it in forms that land.
One participant, working at a nonprofit organisation that develops open source tools for the social sector, described the programme evaluation work they are already doing as a grantee – measuring adoption, sustainability, and comparative impact against commercial alternatives. The challenge is not that this work is not being done; it is that it is being done inside individual grant relationships and never aggregated or made available in forms that could inform broader policy. Here again, the network’s potential contribution could be less about generating new research than about connecting and surfacing what already exists.
Insight #4: Staying in touch
The final stretch of the session turned to infrastructure – not in the technical sense, but in the practical one. How does a network like this actually function between events? The conversation was honest about the friction involved: people are already stretched across too many channels, too many mailing lists, too many Slack workspaces that go quiet after the first month.
Participants gravitated toward lightweight, low-friction tools – Matrix was mentioned approvingly, as was Discourse, which allows participation by email without requiring regular log-ins. There was a gentle push, led by Deb Bryant, toward open source tools rather than proprietary platforms. Several participants suggested that piggybacking on existing events and communities – running sessions within conferences people are already attending, rather than asking them to show up to new ones – would reduce friction and expand reach.
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Open Technology Research has now published 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 Europe and Africa were released on Wednesday. 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 Americas, please make sure to continue sharing it via our survey form, which remains open.