We were a not-for-profit worker cooperative of strategists, innovators, thinkers, builders and facilitators.
We untangled organisational spaghetti by working hand-in-hand with organisations and their teams, helping everyone learn where to intervene in complex systems.
2016 – 2026
We didn't just think outside the box; we shredded it (and then recycled it, obviously). Our services included consultancy, workshops and training, project and product management, research and development, community building, and everything in between.
Based in the UK and Germany, we believed in making things better, together. We thrived on working with purpose-driven organisations that valued environmental sustainability, social responsibility, equality, and human rights. We had a lot of wonderful clients including:
We Are Open Co-op closed on 1 May 2026, but our work and resources continue to be available for future reference and inspiration.
Doug is a specialist in digital literacies and new forms of accreditation such as Open Badges at WAO. He helps people become more productive in their use of technology, including AI.
Laura is a creative champion for communities. She builds, writes, and sees big pictures. She brought humour, tech savvy and a belief that collective action is a powerful tool for a better world to everything she did at WAO.
John connected people for the common good at WAO. He devised and ran open innovation programmes for a host of household names, helping them to break silos both within and between organisations.
Bryan was a founding member of WAO from 2016–2022, after which he transitioned to being a collaborator. He created pictures to explore and engage others in ideas, concepts and messages. He drew everything from avocados to zany figures. His mind turned words into pictures that inspired more words.
Anne was an intern at WAO before becoming a collaborator. She worked to rethink how we teach and learn and created new learning paths and educational materials. Anne brought her certification in media design and degree in cultural and media education to her work with us.
Hannah was WAO's Company Secretary for the first five-and-a-bit years of our existence. She also collaborated with us on various projects after a career change from experienced teacher to UX researcher.
We partnered with plenty of companies, charities, and non-profits — some of which can be found below. We served as critical friends, fractional leaders, innovators, storytellers and community builders. We worked at the intersections of Learning, Technology and Community.
From 2024 until 2026 we worked with Amnesty International UK building community strategy and platform for their activists. Our research, strategies and insights led us to recommend the well known, open source platform Discourse to power their online activist community. We piloted the technology in Q1 of 2026.
Read moreWe worked with the BBC's Responsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Futures to synthesise existing research on AI literacy, understand the nuances of public media's educational role, and create a robust, future-proof framework around the concept of literacies.
Read moreWe spent more than three years working closely with Greenpeace International on several projects, including a robust internal learning programme. We built learning experiences and developed digital strategies that supported their mission and organisational goals.
Read moreWe helped the Digital Credentials Consortium create pathways in and around their technologies, working to advance the field of verifiable credentials and digital learning achievements.
Read moreWe researched, studied and documented the environmental impact and social narrative surrounding generative AI to help Friends of the Earth create a policy position paper. Our research, Harnessing AI for environmental justice, continues to be referenced and lauded as a great reflection on the complexity of technology and its impact on the environment.
Read moreWe worked with a wide variety of clients over our tens years as a digital service cooperative. We couldn't summarise and archive them all, but you can find even more in our GitHub repo.
See more of our clients
Our Learn with WAO site had openly licensed tools, templates, resources, how-tos, courses and more.
We worked openly and wrote about projects, principles and ideas to help spread the benefits and culture of openness.
A podcast about the intersection of technology, society, and internet culture – with a dash of philosophy and art for good measure.
Our internal wiki with policies, processes, and details of how we ran the co-op.
View on GitHub →Documentation and resources from our client projects.
View on GitHub →An archive of the resources, tools, courses, and templates from Learn with We Are Open Co-op.
View on GitHub →Source code for this website.
View on GitHub →Bryan Mathers' Creative Commons licensed illustrations for WAO.
View on GitHub →We didn't delete other repos, so perhaps you'd like to sort through our grabbag of random?
WAO on GitHub →
A value-based, practical framework for public service media organisations.
A research collaboration between the Responsible Innovation Centre (RIC), Bridging Responsible AI Divides Programme (BRAID), and We Are Open Co-op (WAO)
Commissioned by the N-TUTORR National Digital Leadership Network
This report explores the role of micro and digital credentialing in Irish higher education. It addresses the ambiguity around the term ‘microcredential’ and argues for adopting technical standards like Open Badges v3 to establish a clear and interoperable framework.
Principles and practices to guide climate justice and digital rights campaigners in the responsible use of AI.
This paper is primarily aimed at an audience of environmental justice organisations and digital rights campaigners looking to utilise AI in their work and to advocate for sustainability, equality and human rights in the digital sphere.
Advancing media and information literacy for informed citizenship.
We collaborated with Ian O'Byrne on this journal article exploring how media and information literacy can promote informed citizenship in our connected world.