We believe digital technology can and should have a positive impact on society.
We aspire to build a global technological ecosystem that reaches and works for everyone: One that balances innovation with responsibility, regardless of whether technology is deployed by individuals, companies, or governments.
That’s why Omidyar Network makes strategic investments and promotes ideas, technologies, and policies that help ensure a digital world that is safe, fair, and compassionate. We support organizations committed to making positive changes— and apply pressure to those that may be more resistant. In doing so, we can ensure that future technological innovation promotes well-being and individual liberty, while building in safeguards to manage its risks and unintended consequences.
What We're Working On
Omidyar Network works to create a fair and competitive technology ecosystem. We must rein in big tech’s power that can hurt individual well-being, liberty, and innovation.
We support efforts to introduce and enforce checks and balances, contribute new evidence, act as a watchdog, and include historically marginalized voices as we collectively develop policy solutions.
Learn more about our point of view on concentrated power in the tech ecosystem.
Omidyar Network works at the intersection of big data, automated decisions, and artificial intelligence. Our objective is to question the existing lopsided paradigm (where we surrender our data to the whims of powerful entities to collect, surveil, and profit from) and to reimagine a possible future where data control, privacy and security, utility and value are channeled in the public interest.
We support leaders and organizations working to embed values of fairness, inclusion, empowerment, and public benefit into a more equitable data ecosystem.
The use of private messaging platforms and protected, unsurveilled communication is essential for individual agency, civic participation, social connection, and personal safety. Three years ago, Omidyar Network began digital trust and safety work under the banner of securing private and trustworthy messaging. Today, this work spans far beyond just private messaging platforms and is implicated in everything from from multiverses to gaming to social media and consumer AI.
We continue to support individuals and organizations that conduct research, develop technical solutions, and educate tech companies and governments on how to create safer, more secure, online spaces through product design, policy, and incentive changes. As applications of this technology expand and proliferate, we are focused on creating the necessary infrastructure and ecosystem to sustain and incentivize this work globally.
Read more about the foundations of this work and the importance of addressing one of the thorniest challenges in tech: solving for safety and security online while upholding privacy.
Omidyar Network is lifting up a new wave of leaders, companies, and prosocial technologies in pursuit of a thriving ecosystem fueled by responsible innovation.
Through the incubation of The Tech We Want, we’re investing in community, building critical infrastructure, and seeding new narratives that we believe can foster an equitable, inclusive future for tech workers, consumers, investors, and society.
Ideas We're Exploring
At Omidyar Network, we believe young people are both partners and stakeholders in the fight to create more responsible technology.
To support their efforts, we are working to better understand which tech and tech-adjacent issues animate Gen Z-led decentralized organizing, identify the barriers and resource gaps exists in young people’s ability to create positive change, and prioritize ways in which Omidyar Network can elevate youth leadership in the responsible technology movement.
The Internet — the vast, invisible infrastructure that undergirds our daily lives — cannot operate without open-source software. Code that everyone has the freedom to edit, modify and reuse operates the power grids, hospitals, communication and transportation systems, phones, cars, and planes that make commerce and industry possible. However, the sustainability, stability, and security of the open source system is at risk.
Omidyar Network and its partners are helping to educate policymakers about these issues, support developer communities, inform new standards, attract funding, and communicate about the value of open source system to our democracy, economy, technological innovation, and societal wellbeing.
Video gaming is an integral and influential part of 3 billion+ people’s lives at the unique intersection of art, storytelling, and technology. The $90B market, however, is facing some growing pains: anti-competitive business practices, data-hungry business models, limited diversity, and expansions to Web3 and multiverses.
Omidyar Network is exploring how gaming will continue to transform the future of technology and how best to ensure the industry is inclusive and equitable. We are learning about gaming as a collective identity, how in-game economies will shape the new global economy, and gaming as a form of collective protest.
