Legacy & History of Open Culture | 16 June 2026

In the early 2000s, a handful of trailblazing galleries, libraries, archives, and museums made a radical choice: to digitize their collections and release them freely, without restriction, to anyone in the world. There was no playbook. There was no mandate. There was only a conviction that cultural heritage, the shared memory of humanity, belonged to everyone, and that the internet had made it possible, for the first time, to act on that conviction at scale. This panel traces that origin story. How did the open culture movement begin? Who were the institutions and individuals willing to go first, and what did they risk? How did CC licenses and public domain tools become the infrastructure that made openness not just a philosophy but a practice? And what did twenty-five years of building this movement teach us about what it takes to change not just institutions, but the systems that govern them?