What does your lazy summer afternoon at the lake have to do with saving the open Internet?

Hi! I'm Alexa, OpenMedia's new Managing Director - great to meet you! I took a break from the behind the scenes work to share why I’m here. Summer days are perfect for chilling out, reconnecting with friends and family, and reflecting on what in our lives matters most. What matters to me is that my work contributes to building a more just and collaborative world for my kids. I care deeply about OpenMedia’s work to safeguard the possibilities of the open Internet. It’s an essential tool that creates transformative change. This is reason #1 for accepting my job at OpenMedia. It’s one thing to say one cares about democracy and collaboration. It’s another thing to put these values into practice. I saw in OpenMedia an organization consciously and deliberately putting their values of participatory democracy and transparency into practice. This is why we use our

A key focus of my role at OpenMedia is to keep watch over how we work. Not only as an organization, but as a part of the larger, networked pro-Internet community, or ecosystem. We open channels of communication between organizations and ordinary people who are working to keep the Internet open and innovative for everyone. At times we amplify voices; at times we help translate the boring, mundane, technical details; and at times we ">collect, reflect back, validate and present ideas for how to shape new systems and policies. Yes, we are using the digital world to save the Internet but we are also committed to doing so in the most engaging and human ways possible.

Why is the human element important? In his book Here Comes Everybody, author and technologist Clay Shirky claims that while “there are no technological limits to what can be done online”, there are social constraints of interactivity that come with the sheer volume of information on the Internet.¹OpenMedia is actively creating tools and challenging those limits in how we do online engagement. We try to make it easy for you to stay informed and take action on issues in a sea of competing demands on our attention.

Old organizations and institutions have structured themselves to control the flow of information, often from the top down. Here at OpenMedia we pay close attention to information, valuing it as the “solar, life energy of organizations,” and we want it to be as free flowing as possible.² Participatory, open processes are the heart of how we work. This translates into open meetings and content generation where everyone has a chance to input, 360° performance reviews, and collaborative decision making around best practices for workflows and internal policies. This means every campaign direction, email or blog post has most likely been conceived, tweaked, and edited collaboratively by every member of our team, based on input from you, our community.

And as members of our community, I want to hear what you think. Together with more than 700,000 individuals in our network, you are the essential information source we need to have a positive impact on the issues we all care about.

Before I sign off, I'd like to invite you to take a minute to read about How OpenMedia Works. Does it reflect what you observe in real life? What's working for you? How can we improve? Let us know in the comments below.

- Alexa Pitoulis, OpenMedia Managing Director

<sup>1. Shirky, Clay. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press.
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2. Wheatley, Margaret. (1996). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.↩</sup>

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