Openness as a Relational Practice
Openness as a relational practice is an emerging way of understanding openness not only as a condition of access, but as something shaped through relationships, participation, agency, consent, reciprocity, care, and responsibility.
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For a long time, openness made immediate sense to me as a condition. Something could be shared or closed, freely available or behind a barrier, openly licensed or not.
Those distinctions matter. They still matter to me.
But the longer I’ve worked in open education, the more interested I’ve become in what happens after we make something available.
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Because making something open doesn’t tell me much about what happens between the people who encounter it.
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That’s where I keep finding the part of openness I’m most interested in.
Access is important. It isn’t the whole story.
A free textbook doesn’t teach itself. A shared document doesn’t explain why it exists or whether I’m really invited to change it. Giving someone permission to participate doesn’t necessarily give them the knowledge, safety, time, confidence, power, or sense of belonging they need to actually participate.
Access answers an important first question: Can someone get to this?
Open practice stays with what happens after that.
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Can they understand it?
Can they use it?
Do they trust what they’re entering?
Can they contribute rather than simply receive?
Can they disagree?
Can they change something?
Who gets to decide what is shared in the first place?
And what responsibilities come with inviting other people into something we’ve called open?
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Somewhere inside those questions, openness stops looking like only a characteristic of a thing and starts looking relational.
Three dimensions of openness
I’m beginning to understand openness through three dimensions. I don’t see them as competing definitions. They’re different ways of seeing the same idea.
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Openness as a condition is the most familiar. A resource is openly licensed or it isn’t. Information is available or it isn’t. Someone has access or they don’t. This dimension matters because material barriers are real, and removing them can fundamentally change who gets to participate.
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Openness as a relationship asks what happens among the people involved. Who has power? Who decides what is shared and on whose terms? Is participation actually possible, or is someone simply receiving something another person has already defined? Is contribution invited? Is refusal possible? Is there reciprocity? Consent? Responsibility?
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This dimension complicates the comforting idea that making something available automatically makes the practice surrounding it open.
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Openness as a design practice asks what we build differently once we take those relationships seriously. If participation matters, we have to design ways to participate. If consent matters, people need meaningful choices. If reciprocity matters, we have to notice when an exchange moves only in one direction. If we want people to contribute, the path into contribution has to be understandable and possible.
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Taken together, these dimensions move openness from something we simply provide toward something we continually practice.
What changes when we understand openness relationally?
If openness is at least partly relational, some of the ways we commonly describe success only tell us part of the story.
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Adoption numbers, downloads, licenses, and access statistics can tell us important things about availability and reach. They can’t necessarily tell us what kind of relationship people were able to have with what we opened.
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So open practice asks additional questions.
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Who was able to participate?
Who shaped the thing rather than simply receiving it?
Who didn’t enter at all?
Who entered and then left?
What did participation require people to carry?
Whose knowledge changed what happened next?
Who had the ability to say no?
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Those questions are harder to put on a dashboard.
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They’re still worth asking.
An idea still in development
I want to be careful about what I’m claiming here because openness as a relational practice is an emerging idea, not a finished theory.
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I’m developing this understanding in conversation with open educational practice, care ethics, participatory traditions, communities of practice, and scholarship that understands openness as something more than access alone. My doctoral research gives me another place to investigate the larger question underneath it: what happens between the values we say we hold and what people are actually able to practice?
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I don’t yet know exactly what kind of scholarly contribution openness as a relational practice will become. It may be a synthesis of ideas across several traditions. It may develop into a more distinct conceptual framework. It will almost certainly change as I continue reading, researching, practicing, and listening.
For now, I know that I’m no longer satisfied asking only whether something is open.
I want to know what kind of relationship the openness makes possible.