Jennifer Barth
Dr Jennifer Barth is Chief Research Director at Symmetry (formerly Smoothmedia). She has more than 15 years of experience leading independent research on the intersections of emerging technologies and socioeconomic change. She provides companies with independent thought leadership and media engagement opportunities on global issues impacting and shaping our current and future socio-cultural lives.
Her work spans the digital through to social and economic change. Currently she is looking at sustainability, workforce skills and organizational competitiveness strategies through and beyond the pandemic with Microsoft and researching the role of open source software and its potential to fuel sustainable growth with OpenUK. She has experience working on the human impact of artificial intelligence (AI) through fieldwork experiments with IBM Watson and other providers, leading Digital Transformation research for Microsoft, Reinventing Loyalty with Adobe, and developing the Science of Common Ground for Heineken’s award-winning Open your World campaign. She is skilled at research design, qualitative research and analysis, quantitative analysis, new methods using emerging technologies and working with people to bring to life the stories behind numbers.
Dr Barth earned her DPhil in Geography from the University of Oxford.
Session
Open source software along with open data, open hardware and open standards are foundational to today's global digital economy. Latest estimates show that over 90% of software in active commercial stacks have open source dependencies. In a world of geopolitical friction we see increased focus on regulation and a sovereign stack which is only possible with the inclusion of open source software. As shared digital infrastructure, open source software technologies function as digital public goods.
Despite the importance of open source software, its economic contribution has consistently been underrepresented in traditional policy frameworks, national accounts, and innovation metrics. There have been very limited moves to assess the value and a lack of adequate tools for valuation and policy alignment. Our initial findings point to a gap in current economic accounting practices. This obscures the widespread use and impact of open ecosystems.
This paper will assess the options in measuring the economic value of open source software and its contribution to our global economies.
Drawing on macroeconomic modelling, international adoption metrics, and studies from the OECD, Stanford, and Harvard, we outline how open technologies generate cost efficiencies, enhance productivity, and catalyse innovation across public and private sectors. To date only Harvard and OpenUK have identified the value of open source software.
The paper gives attention to the challenge of valuing open source software.It also considers the need to create a model that values AI that is distributed openly such as open weights, open models, and open training data. We argue that defining and measuring these assets is a prerequisite for responsible regulation, funding, and standards development. By contributing to a more nuanced and evidence-based economic narrative, this work supports the case for policy interventions such as strategic procurement, targeted investment, and cross-border collaboration.