This post first appeared on aud.life

A blurb from my application:

How does your idea relate to "openness"

All of my work is openly licensed (CC-BY). It's all posted on GitHub. These are easy and obvious steps towards openness. As an independent scholar, I am constantly confronted with paywalls for academic articles; and without an institutional or organizational affiliation, I am also sometimes prevented from attending events -- my budget doesn't always allow it, if nothing else, and I don't always "count" as press.

The more challenging aspect to "how my ideas relate to openness" involves for me pushing our definitions of what exactly we mean by that term. True, it's always been a contested one, although much of that debate still focuses on appropriate licensing and commercialization. I talked about this issue in my keynote at OpenCon (http://hackeducation.com/2014/11/16/from-open-to-justice/) in late 2014: how do we move from "open" to "justice." How do we explicitly address equity when we are "open"? That is, how do we make sure that we are moving forward towards progressive social change, and not simply assuming that "open" takes care of that.

And for me -- someone who writes challenging, critical pieces that have not always been well-received by those in the education technology field -- what are the results of being "open"? What are the implications for my personal safety, for example, and professional reputation when I do so? How do we work independently from powerful institutions? And who gets to do that? How might the ability to be "open" reflect or re-inscribe power and privilege in other ways?

As I said in my OpenCon keynote, "We need politics, not simply a license. We need politics, not simply technology solutions. We need an ethics of care, of justice, not simply assume that 'open' does the work of those for us."

And the video: