It’s been a decade since I co-founded We Are Open Co-op with Doug Belshaw and John Bevan, a couple of former Mozilla colleagues, and Bryan Mathers, an illustrator and storyteller. An entire decade.
And now things are changing:
After ten years of creative cooperation, we’re announcing that We Are Open Co-op (WAO) will close its doors on our 10th birthday: 1st May 2026. This has been a carefully considered, collaborative decision — the kind we’ve always tried to model as a co-op.
We are curating our ten years of working openly and archiving things, so that we can shut down our cloud storage, servers and weareopen.coop accounts. We have several GitHub repos going where we’re collecting our illustrations, wiki entries and open client work.
Starting on May 1st, I will be going on sabbatical. As is tradition, I will use my time for research, travel, writing. I will build things and garden and make art and visit friends. I’ll see what’s next.
You’re welcome to get in touch with me – hello[at]laurahilliger.com