As we shared in July, Omidyar Network has a new mission: Bending the arc of the digital revolution toward shared power, prosperity, and possibility.
We’re currently finalizing the details of our new strategy, and we look forward to sharing our new goals and initiatives with you in early 2025.
In the meantime, you may have wondered, “What does Omidyar Network’s new mission mean?”—especially as we move from a three-pronged approach encompassing technology, the economy, and belonging to a laser-focused lens on technology’s role in society.
In 2022, we published our vision for a responsible technology future, anchored in our belief that our shared humanity should steer our digital future (and not the other way around). Under our new strategy, Omidyar Network’s greatest undertaking is to motivate decision-makers to elevate humanity as they develop and evolve technology. We will do so by funding, convening, and partnering with the visionaries and ventures that can positively shape the forces that have an outsized influence over our digital future—specifically culture, policy, markets, and technology itself.
In short, our chief task is to help ensure everyone in society:
- Holds the power to shape our digital future.
- Experiences the positive benefits and prosperity technology creates.
- Feels a sense of optimism about society’s relationship with technology and the new possibilities that abound.
Our mission will be accomplished when these three outcomes become our collective reality.
What does shared power mean to Omidyar Network?
A voice for the many, not the few
We believe people are the true protagonists in our digital future. Collectively, we have the imagination and agency to shape the path ahead so that digital technology positively impacts our lives and livelihoods, our communities, and our society.
Currently, most of the power over technology is privatized and held by corporations and their investors. We envision a world where the government has greater control over the direction tech takes (as the body representing the people’s interests in a democracy). Within both companies and government, we also want to see diverse and representative leadership to ensure that the power to make, finance, and regulate technology is more broadly shared (see ties to shared prosperity below). And, especially important, we would also like to see individuals and communities have greater voice, agency, and choice over how technology affects their lives.
As a philanthropic organization, we help build shared power by supporting work that creates more seats at decision-making tables, builds broad solidarity and advocacy coalitions, and seeds healthy narratives about the ideal relationship between technology and society. We will also continue to support the expansion of digital rights, workers’ voices in AI decision-making in the workplace, checks on concentrated power within specific tech markets, public-private transparency and accountability, co-creation of opportunities between companies and communities, open-source systems, and other models of shared power.
What does shared prosperity mean to Omidyar Network?
A commitment to the common good
Technology is shaped by vision and choices. As 2024 Nobel Prize winners Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson write in their book Power and Progress, “The forces which bolstered shared prosperity (new-task creation for less-educated workers, countervailing powers, political representation, and regulatory abilities of government) all became weaker in the digital age.” They contend that today’s “technology is shaped by what powerful people want and believe, generating riches, social respect, cultural prominence, and further political voice for those already powerful.”
Like these authors, we want to reimagine and reshape the path of technology to create true prosperity for everyone. We need AI and other technology to create useful and empowering tools. And we need to make sure that technology creates new jobs and opportunities rather than sidelining people.
“If the machines displace people, if automation rules, if we don’t create enough new tasks, then that technology will have less positive effects on shared prosperity. Some people may still make fortunes, technology could still impact the overall average productivity level, and perhaps there might be a higher output or higher GDP (a key measure that economists track). But are you going to have participation in that prosperity for everyone?”
— Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, authors of Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity
Our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging drives our belief that technology should deliver on its promise to benefit everyone. We live these values by championing new tech industry norms and incentives, strong corporate governance practices and investor stewardship, shared ownership models within tech companies, and robust market competition that fuels innovation and prosperity. We will also continue to seed and update policies, rules, and institutions to ensure the responsible deployment of tech, as well as consumer and worker protections across industries.
What does shared possibility mean to Omidyar Network?
An optimistic lens on the future
Incredible things are possible for everyone in society when tech is guided well. And while we don’t specifically fund medical research, clean energy, space exploration, robotics, or other solutions at scale we, as humans, can appreciate how necessary they are to our advancement.
Under our new strategy, Omidyar Network’s work will help create the conditions all innovations and society need to truly flourish. Omidyar Network will take part in humanity’s digital moonshot by collaborating with other social impact funders on tech issues, supporting the creation of public goods and services and humanity-first innovation by the public sector, incentivizing more responsible tech companies (and investment in them), and directly investing ourselves in responsible technology companies.
How can others support Omidyar Network’s new mission?
A fourth “p”: Partnership
This bold triad—shared power, prosperity, and possibility—serves as a container for many of our deepest human values. It also serves as an open platform for philanthropic partnerships, public and private sector alliances, responsible tech investing, and advocacy that reinforces greater inclusion, connection, cooperation, and collective well-being with tech.
To advance our mission, we must partner and innovate with others. We are not bound by convention, but rather are alive to experimentation in service of impact. We also intentionally seek out and support diverse perspectives to reimagine tech and its influence—especially critical voices that have been left out of the conversation. And we collaborate and convene across difference to counter the exclusionary, divisive, and fragmented state of technology today.
Whether you’re a philanthropist, investor, technologist, policymaker, or simply someone who cares about tech’s outsized role in our lives, please collaborate with us. It will take all of us to guide our digital future intentionally.