User:Aabn2424/Openwashing

Openwashing is the practice of marketing a product or content as open source and openly licensed when it is actually proprietary.

History

Michelle Thorne, Mozilla's Director of the Webmaker Program, first defined openwashing in 2009 as "to spin a product or company as open, although it is not."

The term is based on the concept of greenwashing, or the practice of marketing products as "green," creating the perception that they are environmentally friendly, even though they are not.

Types of openwashing

Open Source

Openwashing was originally used in the context of open source software and information technology. As more technology moved to the cloud, vendors began to position their products as "open." This led to questions over how "open" was defined and whether there should be an evaluation tool for openness.

Open Education

With the growth of the open education movement, openwashing has been used to describe the work of various actors in the open education content marketplace. In 2011, David Wiley used openwashing to describe the company OpenEd Solutions, which offered a service developing open resources for blended schools, when they were in actuality a blended learning consulting firm and were not promoting open education.

Open Data

Openwashing has also been observed in the open data movement. Christian Villum for the Open Knowledge Foundation characterized openwashing as "data publishers that are claiming their data is open, even when it's not--but rather just available under limiting terms." The 2015 Open Data Barometer report offered a definition of openwashing in the context of governmental data as "where governments release selective information without providing an environment for people to use it." The 2016 International Open Data Conference further defined this definition as "providing selective information without having an environment where citizens can freely use that data--whether for building businesses or for holding government to account."

Responses to openwashing

In response to openwashing, many open communities have more clearly defined "open" with definitions and sets of criteria.

Twitter users also use the hashtag #openwashing to call out practices that they consider to be openwashing.

http://hackeducation.com/2014/11/16/from-open-to-justice

https://webfoundation.org/2016/10/openwashing-anyone/

https://www.theengineroom.org/when-the-openwashing-is-over-protecting-the-right-to-know/

http://parisinnovationreview.com/articles-en/when-the-open-wash-comes-with-open-everything

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162517304407

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3t5r3r.4?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=openwashing&searchText=AND&searchText=bn%3A9781909188358&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dopenwashing%26amp%3Bfilter%3Dbn%253A9781909188358&refreqid=search%3Aa8c4d3f91fd092604e508ad4584fd67c&seq=21#metadata_info_tab_contents

Reasons for open washing: https://blog.okfn.org/2018/10/25/open-washing-digging-deeper-into-the-tough-questions/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315739928_Openwashing_A_decoupling_perspective_on_organizational_transparency