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Open working and open IP in grant making

October 2021

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12:00 - 12:20 Intro & Check in

12:20 - 12:30 Overview of Open approach

12:30 - 12:50 Catalyst story

12:50 - 13:10 Heritage Lottery Fund story

13:15 - 13:45 Opportunities & Challenges

13:45 - 14:00 Next steps and close

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Intro & check-in

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Overview of Open approach

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The value of reuse and open working

reduce unnecessary duplication & unnecessary waste in digital tools in the charity sector

increase the quality of digital tools, by focusing effort and funding towards best in class tools

improve the utilisation of digital experts within the sector by reducing the amount of duplicated work

harness the value for learning from open working

Building towards community-owned technology

explore the significant role of funders in encouraging and enabling reuse and open working

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open

available

sustainable

documented

organised

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Open

Making things open, makes things reusable. You already have permission.

Open licenses mean that permission given at point of creation. This means that other organisations know that they can use it without even having to ask.

Products should be licensed in such a way that derivative works also have to be made open and that attribution to the original work is still there. That’s why in the work we did with the lottery that we asked for the LGPL license and the Creative Commons by-attribution share-alike non-commercial license

Funders can support this behaviour by insisting on openly licensed products and materials as tangible outputs of grants.

You’ll need to support grantees to do this. We did through having a lovely group of people called the Open Working Lineup or OWLs. When we did all of the programme wrap up, people found they really appreciated the OWLs and Gilly will talk a bit more about this work later.

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Available

Even open things have a cost to them, and it may be too much for smaller organisations.

They want someone else to look after running things, and pay for it monthly.

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Sustainable

Things can only be relied upon if they have a future. This can mean patient funding.

But it could also be revenue from making a product available to others.

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Documented

Things are only of any use if you know what they are and what they do. For this you need to write documentation.

And software developers need it to understand it and maintain it.

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Organised

Finally, things are only useful if you can find them.

Charities, funders and digital suppliers will all need to know what’s available and suitable.

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Why community owned technology?

It keeps the money within the sector.

It will be built around user needs and sector values, not profit.

It can build more sustainable models.

It will build better things.

It keeps the money within the sector.

Charities should use the best tool for the job, but sometimes startups and existing commercial suppliers can be extractive.

It will be built around user needs and sector values, not profit.

It is often said you optimise what you measure. If you measure financial growth you will optimise for that, not user needs or safeguarding.

It can build more sustainable models.

Grant funding, while vital, often funds new things. Often what we need are incrementally better things, not new things.

It will build better things.

Building shared solutions together builds better things. Making fewer community owned things will mean that more money can be spent to develop higher quality solutions and put more money into service delivery, rather than many duplicated solutions.

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Catalyst story

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Open Working, Open Outputs, Open Licenses

There are now about 700 open outputs from the EDA work with the National Lottery.

This is because we mandated publishing with an Open License, either LGPL or similar for Open Source or Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).

It’s also because we supported people to work in this way through the OWLS (Open Working Lineup).

Grant/contract conditions
Support for open working
Shared learning sessions
Connections to existing resources

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Open: Open Working Playbook

https://app.gitbook.com/o/-LlHOIDBi25iaUko-NIM/s/-MbBprDnuUD27AAbCDPe/

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Available: Oxford Resource Hubs

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Documented: https://recipes.thecatalyst.org.uk/

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Organised: https://alpha.reuselibrary.org.uk/

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Organised: https://alpha.openworking.org.uk/

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Mapping opportunities for reuse and open working to grant making processes

Funding programme designed & launched

Grant application form

Funder +

Grant award

Grant conditions

Open working

Open outputs

Grant criteria

Events and info

Open playbacks/learning

Pre application

Grant term

Post grant

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Heritage Lottery Fund story

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Questions

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Opportunities / Challenges

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Link in chat. 5 mins individually, review as a group

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Opportunities & challenges

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Next steps