What Is Open Practice?
Open practice is the ongoing discipline of designing learning, leadership, and support systems to be transparent, humane, participatory, accessible, and sustainable. It isn't a single technique, and it isn't finished once you do it. It's something you keep doing, the way you keep a door from swelling shut.
That's the short answer.
Here's what I actually mean by it.
It’s probably not what you think of when you hear “open”
When most people hear “open,” they think about access. Open resources. A shared document. A free course. Something you can get to without paying for it or asking permission.
That’s part of openness, certainly. But I’ve come to think it’s one of the easier parts.
Because you can give someone access to something and still leave them standing outside of it. They may technically be allowed in and still not know where to begin. They may not feel like the space was made with them in mind. They may be able to enter but not participate, or participate but have no meaningful way to shape what happens there. They may simply not have the time, capacity, knowledge, technology, support, or sense of belonging required to stay.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to: access doesn’t automatically create participation.
Open practice starts a little earlier and stays a little longer.
Instead of only asking, Can someone get to this?
I want to know: Can they enter it? Can they understand what’s being asked of them? Can they actually participate? Can they stay? Can they shape what happens next? And what are we asking them to carry in order to do any of that?
There’s a difference between unlocking a door and building a threshold someone can actually cross.
What it’s built from
At The Open Practice Academy, I’ve been developing open practice around six commitments. They aren’t a checklist, and I don’t think they work particularly well when we pick whichever one is easiest for a given project. They work together because each one asks us to notice something the others might miss.
Care as infrastructure. I don’t mean care as kindness added to an otherwise unchanged system. I mean building care into the mechanics of how something works: the expectations we set, the choices people have, the information they receive, the time they’re given, the ways they can participate, and what happens when life inevitably interrupts the plan. Care shouldn’t depend entirely on whether a particularly caring person happens to be in the room.
Enterability. Access tells me a door is open. Enterability makes me ask whether someone can actually cross the threshold. I try to design around the next meaningful step a person can reasonably take, not the ideal ten-step version of engagement I wish they had the capacity to give me.
Accessibility by design. I don’t want accessibility to be something we discover we need once someone can’t participate. By then, we’ve already told that person something about who we imagined when we built the thing. Accessibility belongs in the first conversation, the first sketch, the first draft.
Clarity over cleverness. I’d rather be understood than admired. If people can’t tell what they’re supposed to do, where they’re supposed to go, or what happens next, making the system more impressive isn’t going to help. Complexity isn’t the same thing as sophistication, and confusion isn’t evidence of rigor.
Distributed ownership. I’ve worked in too many places where an entire process existed because one person remembered how to do it. We often call that person indispensable as though it’s a compliment, when really we’ve built something fragile around them. Open practice asks how knowledge, decision-making, and the ability to act can be carried by more than one person.
Evidence-informed iteration. I don’t think designing something means deciding how it should work and then waiting for people to comply with the design. I want to see what happens when actual human beings encounter it. Where do they hesitate? What do they misunderstand? What workaround did they invent that might actually be better than my original idea? What became harder than it needed to be? Then I change the thing. The practice is allowed to teach me.
Where this comes from
I didn’t arrive at these ideas alone, and I don’t want to pretend that I did. Open practice sits in conversation with traditions that have been asking related questions for a long time: open educational practice, care ethics, commons thinking, participatory design, communities of practice, accessibility and universal design, among others. My thinking owes something to all of them.
But I’ve also kept running into a question that none of those traditions, on its own, quite answers for me.
What happens in the space between what we say we value and what people are actually able to practice?
I’m interested in that gap. The place where a beautiful principle encounters an actual Tuesday. Where openness meets somebody’s workload. Where care meets a budget. Where participation meets a meeting designed before anyone asked who could attend it. Where an organization’s stated values meet the tiny decisions, defaults, processes, permissions, technologies, and habits that determine what people actually experience.
I don’t know yet whether the contribution I’m developing is best understood as a synthesis, a framework, a theory of practice, or something else. That’s part of what I’m investigating through my doctoral research. What I do know is that the gap is real, I’ve encountered it across very different kinds of work, and open practice is the language I’m developing for staying with it.
What open practice actually does
One of the questions I ask most often is: What conditions made this hard?
That’s a very different question from Who didn’t try hard enough?
And I don’t ask it because I think individual responsibility disappears. I ask it because blame is usually a terrible design tool. If I decide the problem is that someone didn’t care enough, wasn’t motivated enough, wasn’t organized enough, or resisted change, I’ve learned almost nothing about what I could actually make different.
But if I get curious about the conditions, things start appearing.
Maybe the process required knowledge nobody documented. Maybe the invitation came after the important decisions had already been made. Maybe “flexibility” existed, but using it carried a social penalty. Maybe there were twelve steps where there needed to be three. Maybe everyone technically had access, but only the people who already understood the system knew what to do once they got inside.Those are things we can work with.
And that’s important to me because open practice isn’t just a way of noticing what’s wrong. It’s deeply practical. Once I understand what made something difficult to enter, use, participate in, sustain, or shape, I want to know what we can build differently.That’s the practice part.
Notice what’s actually happening. Get curious about the conditions that produced it. Change something on purpose. Pay attention to what that change makes possible, and to what it doesn’t. Then keep going.
Open practice isn’t something you declare yourself to be.
It’s something you keep practicing.