Navigating the Nuanced Landscape of Open Technologies: Highlights from Everything Open 2025
tl;dr
OSPea Felicity Brand attended Everything Open, Australia’s premier open source conference, in January 2025. Here are her impressions of the event.
The Everything Open conference covers a broad range of subjects including open source software, open hardware, open data, open government, and open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). This year's discussions revealed a nuanced perspective on openness to challenge long-held assumptions about data, technology, and community.
The three-day, multitrack event, held in Adelaide, South Australia under the auspices of Linux Australia, drew participants from across the region. The event brought together over 250 technologists, researchers, and community leaders to explore the complex landscape of open technologies in 2025.
Data scarcity
Kathy Reid's insightful "Token Wars" presentation introduced her concept of "alateral damage" - unexpected, non-linear impacts of technological developments. As Kathy explained, generative AI has triggered a critical resource conflict centered on data tokenization: "the Token Wars are a resource conflict being fought not with violent weapons on physical battlefields but through technical, legal, and political means."
The fundamental challenge? Data scarcity. OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever has compared the situation to fossil fuels: “the internet contains a finite amount of human-generated content.” With computational capabilities expanding while available data sources remain limited, we're approaching a "token crisis."
Citing Elinor Ostrom's work on governing the commons, Kathy illustrated tokens as truly rivalrous resources: once used, they're depleted, much like fish in an overfished lake. The critical question emerges: How do we prevent data overfishing while preserving it as a common pool resource?
Protecting the digital commons
Kathy points to Jathan Sadowski research that warns, “The imperative to capture all data, from all sources, by any means possible influences many key decisions about business models, political governance, and technological development.” The consequences of this 'capture everything' mentality are profound. Companies increasingly hoard user-generated data, preparing to sell it back to those same users at premium prices.
Kathy talked about token tactics, exploring the idea that not everything should be open. Kathy showed how some forms of data — rare, precious, and therefore highly valuable for tokenisation — should be strongly protected for cultural, societal, and historical reasons.
Emerging protection strategies include:
- Paywalls
- Data poisoning tools like Nightshade
- Network security safeguards for academic library repositories from services like AARnet
- Website scraping monitoring via tools like Dark Visitors
Kathy encouraged us to question who gets to hoard the token treasure - who controls our data? Trish Hepworth's exploration of libraries' role in open access provided a crucial perspective: knowledge containers, not just the knowledge itself, now hold true power. In a historical context, the library was the container of knowledge. In today's world, the container of knowledge — now data — is LLMs. And generative AI is the black-box interface to that container.
Community, Technological Responsibility, and Hope
Despite the sobering realities of data exploitation and tokenization, the conference offered a vision of collaborative transformation. Trish Hepworth’s core message captured this spirit: “Open is radical rethinking. Open is the future - but how do we do it ethically and responsibly, for the greater good?”
Nicola Nye's "HopePunk" presentation reframed technological development as an optimistic, community-driven endeavor. "HopePunk is a way to give the community an immune system," Nicola suggested, emphasizing the power of people to affect positive technological transformation.
Justin Warren's exploration of open source sustainability provided some hope to the growing challenges of maintaining collaborative technology ecosystems. He described how the traditional open-source model is under pressure, with multiple companies re-licensing projects and maintainer burnout becoming increasingly common. Channeling Stafford Beer's iconic "The purpose of a system is what it does," (complete with a matching t-shirt!) Justin argued that we often prioritize individual achievements over systemic health. Still, most of us share a fundamental aspiration: to share knowledge and data. Like Kathy, Justin referred to Elinor Ostrom’s work to highlight Ostrom’s 8 rules for managing the commons as the key to open source sustainability.
A compelling sign of the tech community's evolving ethos was the increasing inclusion of content warnings and encouragement to self-regulate during presentations. Historically a haven for creative and neurodiverse individuals, it is great to see the tech community visibly championing accessibility and inclusivity. These developments signal a profound commitment to recognizing and valuing the full spectrum of human experience within technological spaces: surely the antidote to the influx of AI permeating our daily lives.
Our Perspective
Everything Open 2025 revealed that openness is no longer a binary concept. It's a nuanced, dynamic approach to technology that requires continuous reflection, ethical consideration, and collective responsibility.
At OSP, we’re eternal optimists and believe in the power of people, but we’re also realists and we are following this emerging landscape closely. The key will be balancing technological innovation with human-centric values—something we hold dear here at OSP—a challenge we believe all human-first companies and projects in the tech community are uniquely positioned to address.
We want to hear your perspective on the future of open technologies. Get in touch to tell us how you’re keeping the human in your tech!
Image credits
Photos from the event by flicstar. Justin Warren photo with permission from Kathy Reid. Circle chat image official event photo cartoonized with Canva.