Open for all

Open For All aims to accelerate the impact economy’s shift to greater openness by focusing on approaches that can drive change at scale.

As a collaborative programme, it brings together organisations working on open practice and knowledge. This enables us to generate resources, support experiments, and foster projects and communities of practice that help impact organisations open up their work.

To shift norms around knowledge in the impact economy, we focus on equipping those driving knowledge practices and collaboration to advance open knowledge. We do this through three main strands of work:

Developing practical tools

We explore how to create open versions of all the main types of knowledge products and activities currently used in the impact economy, prioritising those with high potential impact and ease of adoption. These include:

• Landscape reviews / needs assessments
• Strategies
• Programme, product, and service designs
• Theories of change
• Evaluations
• Learning reviews
• Funders’ and investors’ knowledge activities, including: Application processes, due diligence assessments, grant or investment reporting processes, grant or investment conditions on knowledge and intellectual property

Supporting initiatives at scale

We work with existing efforts to improve knowledge across the impact economy, helping to maximise their reach and impact:

• Programmatic funders and investors – building on their commitment to data, learning, and knowledge capacity among grantee or investee organisations, and transforming that work into open knowledge accessible to the whole sector.
• Existing collective initiatives and communities of practice – supporting the evolution of shared practices into fully open knowledge practices.
• Emerging collectives – helping new communities embed open knowledge practices from the outset, strengthening and accelerating their collective impact.

Working openly

To model open practice ourselves, all programme activity is designed to maximise both outward and inward openness:

• Governance – key decisions are made transparently and inclusively, while keeping governance practical.
• Planning – priorities and resource allocation are shared in draft form for review and iteration, with opportunities for involvement.
• Design & development – all open knowledge work is developed openly, with feedback loops and collaboration built in.
• Learning – we use fit-for-purpose open learning approaches to continuously improve the programme and its impact.