From Reflection to Action: 8 Hot Takes from CC's Open Heritage Roundtable - Creative Commons

From Exploratory Dialogue to Roundtable

At our Open Heritage Dialogue held at UNESCO House last April, we had convened to find answers to an important question: How can equitable access to heritage help solve global challenges? What we heard was that it can in a diversity of ways: from supporting access to education to strengthening social inclusion and spurring artistic creativity, all the way to helping find concrete solutions to fight climate change.

Five months later, on 29 September, we returned to Paris ready to move the conversation forward. Together with the Representation of Québec within the Permanent Delegation of Canada to UNESCO, we brought together around 30 participants to our Open Heritage Roundtable to discuss possible ways forward at UNESCO, with whom CC is an NGO in official partnership (consultative status). Participants hailed from UNESCO permanent delegations, UNESCO national commissions, national government and ministries of culture, national libraries and archives, international NGOs from the open heritage community, including the Open Heritage Coalition, among others, and their interventions were made in French and English.

Concretely, our goal was to explore the feasibility of elaborating a new UNESCO Open Heritage Recommendation that would ensure heritage is protected, preserved and equitably shared as a means to address global challenges. The welcome remarks clearly set the tone for the discussion: "Fin des réflexions, début de l'action." ("The end of reflection. The beginning of action."). The program was structured in two parts, allowing for high-level contributions to set the stage for a roundtable discussion inviting all participants to chime in with questions, comments and new perspectives.

In this blog post, we share eight hot takes from the Roundtable discussions, which centered on the urgent need to start the process for the development of a UNESCO Recommendation on Open Heritage.

Hot take #1 - Open heritage is a real thing

One thing became clear over the course of the event: open heritage is not an abstract idea waiting to be tested. It is already happening in institutions and communities around the world. Qatar National Library, for example, has digitized more than 15 million pages of books, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, archival documents, photographs, and other materials. Open access is one of its core values, and the Library does not assert new copyright over reproductions of public domain works. At the same time, its experience demonstrates some of the challenges that make international alignment so important. This includes complex copyright rules, inconsistent institutional practices, dispersed collections, differences in metadata, and the cost and capacity required to build and maintain digital infrastructure. Open heritage is already embedded in thousands of institutions, as identified in the OpenGLAM survey. Institutions around the world are already showing what becomes possible when heritage is opened for people to discover, study, interrogate, reuse, and create with. Yet they still make up only about 1% of all cultural heritage institutions worldwide. The question is no longer whether open heritage can work. It is how we create the conditions for more institutions, communities, and countries to participate.

Hot take #2 - Open heritage is about agency and critical thinking

The roundtable also pushed the conversation beyond simple access as a technical exercise. Cultural heritage institutions provide access to more than artefacts and documents. They are gateways to understanding our world and ourselves as humans. They provide context and make it possible for people to compare sources, question received narratives, understand how histories have been constructed, and recognize what (or who) may be missing from the record. This is something that is top of mind in Luxembourg's national cultural policy. Access to source material and its metadata can give people greater agency to form their own judgements and reach their own conclusions about the past, rather than relying solely on the narratives presented to them in the present. This need takes on greater urgency at a time of democratic fragility, growing misinformation, and technological upheaval.

Hot take #3 - Open heritage means living heritage

The possibilities really expand when people can engage with heritage in participatory, interactive ways. One example shared during the Roundtable came from Germany, where high school students used an openly available digital reproduction of a Renaissance portrait held at Frankfurt's Städel Museum to reinterpret the work in ways that reflected their own experience with the centuries-old painting. It was a small but powerful example of "living heritage" i.e. heritage that remains relevant not simply because we preserve it, but because new generations can encounter it, use it, question it, and make new meaning from it. (UNESCO uses "living heritage" as a quasi synonym for "intangible cultural heritage" -- in the example, it was used as a way to illustrate the value of heritage when it comes alive via remixes and re-interpretations, moving beyond its wall-decorating function to deepen human connections). These practices are increasingly becoming part of institutional infrastructure. Major German museums have already made hundreds of thousands of public domain objects openly available online, alongside broader national investments in research data infrastructure and cultural data spaces.

Hot take #4 - AI is reshaping the contours of open heritage

From Aruba came another dimension. For small island developing states (SIDS) shaped by colonial histories, heritage may be dispersed across institutions and borders. Digital access can help reconnect people with cultural memory while supporting research, education, and new cultural creation. Global access goes hand in hand with local cultural strengthening. And as artificial intelligence increasingly relies on what is discoverable in the digital knowledge environment, the need to clarify what equitable access and responsible use mean take on heightened urgency: cultures and smaller languages such as Papiamento risk being underrepresented in the AI-mediated cultural discourse when heritage is not discoverable in the digital environment.

From experiences in Québec, we heard that the rise of AI confers a new responsibility on CHIs: making heritage accessible while ensuring that its cultural, social and economic values are preserved. AI is forcing the sector to move beyond the well-trodden debate opposing open and closed data as absolutes -- neither offer lasting solutions and neither are "equitable." New realities call for an "ouverture raisonnée" (a thoughtful openness approach), which supports innovation while protecting authors' rights, collective interests and the value of heritage data.

The Roundtable allowed for a fruitful exchange spotlighting different places and different institutional contexts, but they point toward a shared challenge: how can we ensure responsible and ethical access to heritage in the age of AI? The development of a future Recommendation would offer the discussion space that is direly needed to address these fundamental questions together, in line with the work undertaken under the 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of AI.

Hot take #5 - An Open Heritage Recommendation means welcoming heritage to the UNESCO "open family"

UNESCO has already shown what international alignment around openness can accomplish. The 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources and the 2021 Recommendation on Open Science established shared international frameworks for advancing openness in education and science. They give Member States common approaches to addressing challenges and translating principles into policy and practice. For example, in the Netherlands, experiences with the implementation of these Recommendations met resounding success, according to a participant. When considered alongside education and science, heritage is conspicuous by its absence. It is the missing part of the triptych, the glaringly missing third pillar.

The opportunity now is to build on UNESCO's successful experience and bring heritage, as a transversal issue, more fully into the "open" normative family, at a moment when equitable access to reliable, trustworthy information is becoming more important than ever. A UNESCO Recommendation on Open Heritage could fill the policy gap at UNESCO and erect that missing third pillar, by providing a shared international framework for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment.

Hot Take # 6 - Open heritage is about connecting UNESCO's transversal dots

The Roundtable further surfaced connections between open heritage and work already underway across UNESCO's diverse areas of its mandate: cultural diversity, heritage preservation, digital infrastructure, education, artificial intelligence, and respect for cultural rights, including participation in cultural life.

Some of those connections are already visible in Member States' implementation of existing UNESCO instruments. Germany's Culture Data Space (Datenraum Kultur) and Art Doc Archive in Berlin, for example, feature in its reporting under the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Open heritage and many of UNESCO's activities are already intersecting in practice. Let us recall that the Preamble of UNESCO's Constitution affirms "that the wide diffusion of culture (...) [is] indispensable to the dignity of man and constitute[s] a sacred duty." (para. 4).

This was an important thread in the broader discussion: rather than launching a separate policy conversation, a future Recommendation on Open Heritage would crystallize the existing connections in place and bring increased intersectoral coherence to the work UNESCO and its Member States are already doing in the context of heritage's rapid digital transformation and in ensuring that culture can be enjoyed at a global public good.Simply put, open heritage aligns with UNESCO objectives and approaches.

Hot take #7 - The open heritage foundation has already been laid

Importantly, drafting a Recommendation would not mean starting from scratch. The case for open heritage has been building for years and we know that despite many advances, unnecessary barriers continue to unduly limit access to public domain heritage. Those undue barriers take many forms. Institutions may place restrictive website terms of use or technological restrictions on heritage material in the public domain. Unreasonable access or licensing fees can prevent legitimate uses of the public domain. National laws can create new layers of "pseudo-copyright" restrictions. Unfounded copyright claims and incorrect labeling of the public domain generate confusion and can have a chilling effect on creativity and knowledge generation. And inconsistent approaches across institutions and jurisdictions can leave users, and institutions themselves, uncertain about what is possible, leaving the promise of open heritage largely unrealized.

We also know what more equitable access can make possible: new opportunities for education, research, creativity, cultural participation, and connection across communities and borders. Interventions during the Roundtable made compelling pleas: "donnez-nous de la donnée" ("give us data"), especially to ensure people with disabilities as well as marginalized and vulnerable groups can participate in cultural life and shape their own narrative.

Recognizing these benefits and documenting these barriers -- in addition to offering co-created, clear policy solutions to them -- are some of the great achievements of the Open Heritage Statement. Developed through years of research, consultation, and collaboration within the Open Heritage Coalition, and boasting 116 signatories from all continents to date, it represents a global community coming together around a shared aspiration that public domain heritage should be as broadly accessible and reusable as possible, while respecting cultural governance frameworks. The foundation is there. The Open Heritage Statement offers UNESCO Member States a tangible starting point to deepen understanding and enrich the dialogue.

Hot take # 8 - Open heritage is an invitation to connect as humans

Heritage is brimming with connections -- between people and places, past and present, memory and identity, evidence and understanding. More equitable sharing of heritage can be the source of intercultural, transborder and mutually enriching collaborations. Open heritage can create the conditions for people to connect with heritage as a shared resource and, vitally, with each other. But only if unnecessary, unfair barriers do not stand in the way.

The need to protect those conditions is becoming more urgent, not less. As our cultural record increasingly moves into digital environments -- and as those environments increasingly shape how people learn, create, and understand the world -- questions about who can access heritage, whose heritage is visible, and what people can do with it carry growing consequences. A shared understanding of these questions, and a multilateral dialogue about how to answer them, are one of the many outcomes of a potential Recommendation.

Looking ahead - Where there's a will there's a way

The Roundtable was an eye-opening exercise in that it grounded the urgency to develop a Recommendation in practical, evidenced, real-life needs. It also surfaced the positive energy that the Open Heritage Coalition generated and that continues to fuel policy action on many fronts, from grassroots advocacy initiatives in the Wikimedia community to civil servant foresightedness and ability to mobilize entire countries at all levels of leadership.

What the Roundtable also made clear is that the conversation is no longer only about whether equitable access to heritage is valuable -- 116 (and counting) influential organizations have voiced this in no uncertain terms. It is increasingly about how UNESCO Member States can work together now to make open heritage possible on a global scale and how a UNESCO Recommendation could provide a framework for sustained international cooperation in the face of global challenges.

With the 2029 UNESCO General Conference in view as our desired finish line, the time to move that critical conversation forward is now. The next step is for a Member State to make a proposal to the UNESCO Executive Board in the spring of 2027. Building on what is already well underway, Member States now have the opportunity to erect the missing "open" third pillar. And where there's a (political) will, there's a way.