Author(s): Nicholas Gates (Senior Policy Director, OpenForum Europe)
At 08:00 CET on 19 March 2026, researchers, practitioners, and advocates from the Asia Pacific region joined the first of three global consultations convened by the Open Technology Research initiative. Amongst other locations, participants dialled in from India, Taiwan, and New Zealand for a small but geographically and professionally diverse group discussion, moderated by Renata Avila of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
The purpose of these consultations is to ensure that the research agenda being developed by OTR’s three founding partners reflects the realities, priorities, and gaps that practitioners and researchers are actually encountering in their work. Not a research agenda that looks good on paper, but one that is actionable, diverse and inclusive, grounded in necessary context from across regions, and connected to the policy moments where evidence can make a difference. The Asia Pacific consultation offered some early insights into what that agenda needs to address for that region in particular.
Insight #1: Fragmentation as a core problem
One thread running through the discussion was not any single research topic, but a structural observation about the field itself: that the people doing relevant work – researchers, technologists, and policymakers – are operating largely in isolation from one another, with little infrastructure to connect them. A participant from India put it directly: there are people who are good at policy, people who are good at research, and people who are good at technology, but the links between them are weak, and the priorities rarely align. The result is that energy gets dispersed, duplication goes unnoticed, and the window for research to actually shape decisions often closes before findings can reach the people who need them.
This is, in many ways, the problem that OTR was created to address. But hearing it articulated independently, from someone outside the founding organisations, gave it a different weight. The network model – connecting researchers with the communities they want to study, and channelling findings to policymakers at the right moment – is not just an organisational aspiration (in the form of the Open Technology Research Network, or OTRN). It is, participants suggested, a genuine gap in the current landscape.
Insight #2: Procurement as an urgent research priority
If there was a single substantive topic that dominated the consultation, it was public procurement. Participants from Switzerland, Taiwan, and New Zealand each raised it, independently and from different angles, which suggests it is something more than a regional preoccupation. It’s one of the key levers by which research and evidence get translated into public policy in a way that has a tangible impact on digital infrastructure and digital service delivery outcomes.
In Taiwan, some actors are actively working to persuade government bodies to adopt open source solutions, but repeatedly encounter the same obstacle: policymakers want proof that it has worked somewhere else. Case studies, comparative examples, and concrete evidence of outcomes – these tend to be what open doors. Without them, even sympathetic officials find it difficult to take action. The same dynamic plays out in New Zealand, where the open source research and funding landscape is constrained, and government procurement of technology remains heavily oriented toward commercial solutions.
Beyond the legislative dimension, participants also flagged subtler questions that governments tend to get stuck on – for example, the total cost of ownership of open source solutions, or the question of how to sustain the relationship between government, business, and community over time once a procurement decision has been made. These are not abstract research questions. They are the specific obstacles standing between open source advocacy and actual policy change in the region.
Insight #3: Research capacity – and the lack of it
The third major theme was the uneven distribution of research capacity across the region. The picture that emerged was one of pockets of activity without much connective tissue between them. Formal research capacity tends to sit within universities and government institutions, but a significant number of people doing meaningful work on open technologies are operating outside those structures – self-taught, self-funded, and largely invisible to the international research community.
In New Zealand, funding for open source work flows mainly through international organisations or academic channels, with government technology funding directed primarily at commercial applications. Open source research, where it happens, tends to be ring-fenced to specific grant conditions rather than sustained by institutional commitment. The situation in other parts of the region can be quite similar, though a more in-depth understanding of specific regional differences will need to be enumerated.
Participants pointed to some resources that might be underused or underleveraged in the region – networks like CURIOSS, which supports university open source programme offices, and the CHAOSS community, which focuses on open source metrics and ecosystem health. These offer examples of research infrastructure that even well-resourced individual researchers can plug into, but need continued socialisation.. But the broader point stood: one of the most useful things OTR could do is to collect and publish information on funding opportunities, fellowships, and research infrastructure, and make it genuinely accessible to researchers in regions that currently lack it.
————————————————————————————————–
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 Europe and Africa will be released on Wednesday, 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 Asia Pacific Region, please make sure to continue sharing it via our survey form, which remains open.