2026 Open Education Conference

Open education often advances through disconnected efforts in policy, coordination, and practice. This session explores how connecting those “open dots” can strengthen impact across Europe. Drawing on SPARC Europe’s work on Connecting the Opens, the feasibility report for a European Open Education Alliance, and the community-building work of the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL), the presentation examines how open education can be better linked with related open movements, supported through stronger coordination, and sustained through practitioner networks. Rather than treating these as separate strands, it presents them as complementary parts of a broader strategy to advance open education as a public good. Attendees will gain a European perspective on how policy alignment, alliance-building, and community practice can work together to create more coherent, connected, and sustainable open education ecosystems.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Describe how policy, alliance-building, and community practice interact in shaping open education ecosystems.
• Explain the value of connecting open education with adjacent open movements.
• Identify key opportunities and challenges in building more coordinated open education structures at a regional level.
• Analyse the contribution of practitioner networks such as ENOEL to sustaining the open in practice.
• Apply the idea of “connecting the open dots” to their own institutional, national, or regional context.

Every day, we hit warp speed. Every day, we forget what it means to warp. If Open Education programs want to survive, our captains need to stare into The Warp, the Immaterium, the Unspace: The Space Between.

The early years of open education management included what many leaders called "building the plane as we flew it." Open Education organizations and initiatives were assembled for pilot projects like grant programs or workshops - sometimes built solely around the existence of funding or an idea for one event. As OE programs mature, what used to be "the plane" now travels faster than light. But do we know enough about how we travel? Do we understand what it means to warp?

Through the cosmic lenses of Star Trek, Warhammer 40K, and Adrian Tchaikovsky, Jeff will take you through the sometimes-painful creation of an open Standard Operating Procedures document and how this practice could help build transparency and ethical automation into the fundamental processes that make Open happen.

Attendees of this session will be able to:

• Identify standard definitions and explain their open education programs within these terms.
• Adapt and create a Standard Operating Procedures document for their own open education program.
• Build accessibility into existing processes and target accessibility-by-default in both publishing and work procedures.