I understand that there are costs and logistics that would be a problem, but as the situation in the U.S. becomes increasingly disturbing, the board should seriously consider moving the conference outside of the U.S., to online, or cancel it. While normally I would attend the conference when it’s so close (I’m in Canada), I will not attend a conference in the U.S., even though I have a U.S. passport. Likely, there are many who are passionate about open and live outside the U.S. who feel the same way.
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I live here in the U.S. and can completely understand your reservations about coming here.
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I will just second that, even though this conference is in driving distance for me, I will absolutely not consider crossing that border.
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I fully support everyone’s individual right to decide whether attending in person or online is the right choice for them. Those decisions are deeply personal and shaped by considerations of access, resources, and most importantly, safety and well-being.
Speaking personally - and not in my role as OEGlobal staff - I feel strongly that this is an important moment to show up in person. For me, attending is an act of resistance and solidarity.
In workshops I co-presented at OER25 and OpenEd25 with colleagues from around the world, we talked about stories of resistance and about uniting open practitioners in times of crisis. For me, this is why I attended a January 6th vigil 2 nights ago in my state’s capital and why I attend protests. I hope to see many others who share this spirit of resistance and to affirm our shared values in Cambridge this fall.
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Heather,
That’s fine for people in the U.S., but as a Canadian (I’ve lived most of my adult life here), who, like most Canadians, is aware that our country has been repeatedly threatened by the current U.S. administration, I don’t travel to the U.S. and I do all I can to not purchase items from the U.S. For me, going to the U.S. for a conference or any reason other than seeing my elderly parents wouldn’t be resistance. It would be capitulation and approval of what is being done by the administration to human beings both inside and outside the U.S.
I don’t know anyone in the open community in Greenland or anywhere else in the Danish kingdom, but I suspect they won’t be jumping to come to the U.S. anytime soon, either. I also suspect you won’t see a lot of enthusiasm from people from Mexico, Central or South America.
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Fellow Canadian here! Even if I wanted to venture into the U.S. right now, my institution is limiting travel to the U.S. (and purchases as well), so I would very likely be denied my request. I fully support the recommendation to move the conference outside of the U.S., to online, or cancel it.
Canada’s relationship with the U.S. aside, can it even be considered a global conference if people from certain countries are at risk if they choose to attend?
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Also Canadian here. I think even if people were able and willing to travel to the USA, there’s no guarantee that this will even be an option by September. It’s unlikely that institutions would be willing to finance travel to such a volatile travel destination, given the rapid state of developments down there.
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Thank you friend, Saskatchewan neighbor, and fellow expat @hmross for opening this dialogue. I am a similar boat as a US citizen who proudly achieved my Canadian citizenship in September. Oh Canada!
Like my OEG colleague Heather B, I speak first personally that since the change in administration crossing the border has been off the table, as a safety risk I am not willing to take, made even more dire in the this weeks wave of violence. I will not cross.
With a little bit of my OEGlobal hat on, from the very beginning the planning has been for OEGlobal 2026 to be in format offering both in-person and online participation.
For all OEG conferences I have been part of since joining, I have put all my energy into creating opportunities for online participation, including 2022 when due to COVID I was not in Nantes but was “there” online.
From what I have seen so far, this OEGlobal conference will be more hybrid than any before, and I aim to do everything in my power to make sure virtual experience is a valuable one. And I am counting on this community to help drive / dream a meaningful approach to coming together.
Believe me I am immensely disappointed to not be present in Cambridge, I have had the fortunate to visit and collaborate with MIT colleagues over the years, I will miss that magic feel of that place.
Heavy sigh.
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I also respect everybody’s right to their decisions…. and consider it an act of resistance to refuse to come to this country. Also, this is a conference, not a protest.
My novelist mind does imagine using the guise of a conference as a way to organize other thing, behind the scenes, but it would be a conference that would be less suspicious…
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This is a valuable point to have raised; thanks to the folks who’ve chimed in. Just for context, this past year I traveled to and through the US a few times. I’m a US and Canada passport holder and white with an English name.
Aside from folks not wanting to travel to the US as a matter of protest (a nice luxury we have up here in Canada), there are a lot of folks who won’t be willing to travel to the US because of basic and valid safety concerns.
- Flying through SFO to and from Mexico in October, I was more than a little alarmed to see that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) not only had the basic security checkpoints at the airport but was also doing secondary checks of everyone at the boarding gate.
- Driving back to British Columbia from the US, CBP had set up checkpoints after the final opportunity to turn around but before you crossed into Canada so that they could inspect every vehicle trying to leave the country.
- As well, CBP is proposing to require folks from a whole bunch of countries to submit to a 5-year social media search if they want to gain entry, and has already shown a willingness to reject foreign nationals after searching their phone once they arrive at the border without warning. Being rejected at the border once can lead to a lifetime ban from the country.
- It’s not a great time to cross the border, to say nothing of being a non-American just about anywhere in the US when the Supreme Court has given ICE a green light to use racial profiling when deciding who to detain.
Things will probably be fine for me to travel to Chicago this summer for ALA’s annual conference, but I’m still nervous and largely avoiding unnecessary travel to the US because things are grim and the rules that folks are asked to follow (along with what ICE is allowed to get away with) are constantly shifting. I expect that a lot of folks who might be otherwise willing to travel for the conference won’t be willing to make the trip to the US for safety reasons, and I can’t fault them.
That said, I also get that it’s a ton of work getting the logistics of a conference figured out once, and the work of doing it a second time in another country is a big ask. @cogdog I’m glad you mentioned the online portion; I think that’s a great way to give folks another option to attend.
If a location change isn’t in the stars, I wonder if this year might present an opportunity to try out some concurrent satellite events for the conference to make the most out of it? I.e. if folks can find venues that are willing to host, might there be appetite from the conference organizers’ side to facilitate multiple smaller in-person experiences abroad?
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Good evening from France, thank you @hmross and each of the participants to the conversation on the location of next conference. I am the president of the board and please note that we have well taken this question into account, that we will be collectively discussing and answering. And when I say collectively, I include MIT team of course. From a personal perpective, I am first so greatfull to the MIT and the people who have been there for 25 years, sharing and caring that any person in the world could have access to quality education. This was and still is a vivifying development of the bright lights of the 18th Century that led to develop public service of education as a model of equality, development and emancipation. This has led France to create longlasting financial supports for open educational policies that are still developing nowadays and thanks to which I have discovered and decided to dedicate my work and more to the movement. However, I will not attend physically to the conference for all the reasons listed above. I am looking forward hearing TOMORROW January 2026, 15th the 25th anniversary online webinar of Wikipedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:Wikipedia_25_Virtual_Celebration
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I am so grateful for this discussion and thank @PerrineCoet for sharing that us board members have also raised and share these concerns. I too am grateful for MIT Open Learning’s leadership in this space and their willingness to step up and host our conference (something that takes a long time to prepare for and no small investment of time and funds). And I am grateful for the hard work of OEG staff to make online/hybrid participation a possibility. While I will be sad to miss attending the 2026 conference in person, like others I am unwilling to risk my liberty in order to do so.
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Good on you Peter for taking on the border challenges. Are you at the point of not taking technology with you? Using burner phones?
I too have wondered about the satellite site approach, I was impressed seeing the way the OTESSA 2025 conference was designed to take place at multiple international locations- still a big undertaking for coordination.
Given how powerful a presence MIT has been and is for Open Education, I’d have hopes to not only enable virtual attendance/presenting but finding worthy ways to achieve more of what a conference experience does for “being there”.
I have long kept mind the ideas Dominik Lukes wrote about in COVID times about the “affordances” of the conference experience. I can’t say I really have found a best solution, but it grounds me to think about those ideas of what about space and time at a conference does for you.
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Much appreciation @PerrineCoet and @rjhangiani for your voices as board members and the respect for MIT to take on this challenge, and not to throw the towel in.
And I would like to underscore that the OEGlobal organization would not be here were it not for the groundwork of MIT that spawned us as the OER Consortium but also earlier, breaking the very ground for so many of us with the bold idea of MIT OpenCourseware. That was a radical idea that set in motion almost everything in Open Education.
The last time our conference was hosted in the USA was at MIT in 2011 and then it was celebrating the 10th anniversary of MIT OpenCourseware. So do the math to see also the significance of returning to MIT in 2026.
So much of our work is traced back there to Cambridge and many many innovators and bold thinkers at MIT, and this is our opportunity to take that path forward-- boldly.
If have been are can be at MIT you know the boldness there in the architecture, the projects, the people. It speaks to doing what is possible. Let’s do that for OEGlobal 2026.
The Daring of Stata flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
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@cogdog Well since you asked, yes, I did bring a burner phone the first time, and I coincidentally had a shockingly empty laptop with no accounts signed into. (ah the joys of being a tech nerd with a bad habit of e-waste hording).
Re: in-person remote attendance, I’d be happy to ask the folks at IA Canada here in Vancouver if we can borrow their event space for a small gathering of folks. I know you and @rjhangiani are out of province now (miss you Rajiv and regret not being closer in your orbit while you were here!), but if there are folks who are local or would be interested in coming this way I’m happy to try and facilitate something. (plus, OE Global will be well after FIFA leaves Vancouver so if someone DID want to fly in there’d be hotel space again 
) If that results in coming up with resources to help others do the same, all the better!
Anyhow, look at me sticking to my/the general librarian brand of volunteering one’s self for more work. Oops!
Thanks again to you, the board, and the folks at MIT for making anything possible in the first place. 
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For those that read and participated in this thread, please know your voices have been heard. The conference planning team, our colleagues at MIT, and the OEGlobal Board of directors are all working hard (believe me, like daily meetings) to address concerns.
Out of that is a desire to hear your thoughts and constructive ideas for OEGlobal 2026, so please note there is an open, anonymous survey asking the questions on How Will You Participate in OEGlobal 2026.
You input absolutely matters. Please know this. The survey should take only a few minutes.
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Hi @Peter! I’m definitely interested, and KPU might be able to help support in some ways (would need to confirm with management of course). Let’s talk about it!
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Thank you @Peter! And I am still based in BC the majority of the time, so would be happy to partner on a local event.
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When I briefly traveled to the US last week – to see an ailing relative… not an easy choice but I felt I had to! – I took only burner electronic devices and my personal files on a thumb drive encrypted against nation-state attackers (ask me how to do this, if you have the need: I used to work as a cryptologist and am fairly confident I know how to do it). At the border, I was questioned extensively about my activities outside the US, even though I was entering with a US passport.
While I applaud the great work that MIT has done, and continues to do, in open education, it seems to me that right now the question the open education movement must confront is how to respond to the rise of fascism. Anything else risks just making us irrelevant.
Academia and NGOs have a very mixed track record in their responses to fascism, unfortunately, and honestly I do see some signs of complacency or even enshittification in parts of our movement. But one could also imagine that we might rise to this challenge and live our values, learn from history, practice critical thinking and intentional equity, trust the science, check the footnotes, etc. (I have a similar response to the question of what I think about good scholarly practice and critical thinking as Gandhi supposedly had about western civilization: it would be good idea.) We might do these things very aggressively and openly, or carefully and quietly (e.g., the sociology of resistance teaches us about weapons of the weak and other strategies), but I am not comfortable working in this movement if we don’t try to do something.
To my mind, the best possible theme for a companion conference to be held outside the US (obviously) would be Open Education Under Fascism.
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Last week, the board members and the staff exchanged on this thematic. We also care that everyone has an opportunity to share their thoughts through a poll that you may have received through OEG mailing lists or that is available here: How will you participate in OEGlobal 2026?
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