Following my talk last year at the 4th Open Conference on Open Scholarship in Japan, I was thrilled to be invited to the OASPA 2026 Conference in Zagreb, Croatia, as an opening keynote speaker. The conference took place from 21 to 23 September and brought together members of the global open access community to exchange perspectives, share experiences and explore new approaches to advancing open access. The programme brought together researchers, publishers, librarians and open knowledge practitioners through keynote presentations, panel discussions, interactive sessions and opportunities for networking and exchange. ### **How does open knowledge contribute to society?** The opening keynote panel focused on the question **“How does open knowledge contribute to society?”** , bringing together perspectives from different areas of the open knowledge ecosystem. I joined Nataliia Sokolovska and Nokuthula (Noks) Mchunu for the discussion, moderated by Ben Johnson. I approached the discussion from my practical experience as a Wikimedian and librarian, with a particular focus on the relationship between open knowledge and public participation. Rather than looking at openness only from the perspective of access to research and scholarly outputs, I reflected on how communities can actively participate in creating, documenting and sharing knowledge. In my work with the Wikimedia movement, I have had the opportunity to contribute to initiatives that put this principle into practice. During my talk, I referred to Wiki Loves Women and WikiChallenge African Schools, initiatives of Wiki In Africa, as examples of how open knowledge can create opportunities for different communities to participate in the knowledge ecosystem. These examples helped me reflect on a broader question: What does it mean to make knowledge genuinely open? Making knowledge available is an essential part of openness, but participation is equally important. An open knowledge ecosystem also needs to consider what happens after knowledge is made open: Is it available in languages people understand? Is it shared in formats they can access, use and adapt? Can communities find it, contribute to it, and build upon it? For me, these questions are central to making openness meaningful. Knowledge can be technically open and still remain difficult to access or engage with if it is not available in relevant languages, accessible formats or contexts that communities can use. There can be an inspiration gap between making knowledge available and enabling people to see themselves as potential contributors to it. Creating opportunities for participation therefore means thinking not only about opening knowledge, but also about how people can reach it, understand it, be inspired by it, contribute to it and reuse it. This is one of the areas where I see strong potential for greater connections between the open access, open science and Wikimedia communities. The experience of working with communities through Wikimedia initiatives has shown me that participation often begins with an invitation, a relevant entry point, or simply the opportunity to see that your knowledge and experience have a place in the commons. Being part of the OASPA conference gave me the opportunity to bring this perspective into conversations around open access and open scholarship, while also listening to people working across different parts of the ecosystem. More importantly, it gave me new inspiration to think about where these communities could connect, where existing gaps could become opportunities, and how we can create more pathways for people to move from being audiences of open knowledge to active participants in it. I left Zagreb with new questions, new connections and new ideas for what could come next. For me, this is one of the strengths of being part of the open knowledge movement: every conversation can reveal a new possibility for collaboration, and every gap can become an opportunity to make openness more meaningful. Open knowledge is not only about opening what already exists. It is also about creating the conditions, formats, languages, connections and opportunities that allow more people to participate in building what comes next.

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