The "Open Research Institute" is a metaphor to talk about our relationship to humanity's collective knowledge.

Pretend like there exists a giant planet-wide university, and its internal chatroom is the internet.

• The staff & faculty all have open office hours, you are free to question the people shaping collective human knowledge.
• Anyone can contribute to it - a blog post, YouTube video, or Wikipedia edit all count as a publication.
• The institute has a natural hierarchy, measured by the minds you influence.

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The purpose of defining ORI this way is to discover, debate, and have language for where new knowledge comes from, and what our responsibility is relative to it.

Every human has a relationship to ORI (takes from, or gives to, humanity's collective knowledge). ORI "staff" are those who work on anything that affects how knowledge is discovered, propagated, or applied on the planet.

Welcome to ORI. We're co-workers in this shared landscape, whether we like it or not. Let's see if we can make this place a little better than how we found it 🌷 💐 🌻

— Omar Shehata (June 26th, 2026)