A thriving global community of learners, experimenters, and contributors advancing freedom with open source communication and information technology.

Our vision articulates the world we aim to create through our efforts, and serves as our north star for our funding and other program activities.

• Thriving global community: we aim to enable all people, everywhere, to collaborate in a way that crosses borders and fosters international goodwill.
• Learners, experimenters, and contributors: everyone has the right to learn, experiment, and contribute to collaboratively and peacefully building the technologies and communities they wish to see in the world
• Advancing freedom: the word freedom means different things to different people. Here, we mean the freedom to tinker and build with little or no gatekeeping, as well as the freedom to communicate and share information, in service of assisting others. We also believe in the power of free software to enable learning, experimenting, and doing by all people, everywhere, in a way that commercial products and software generally do not.
• Open source communication and information technology:
  • ARDC’s origins lie at the intersection of traditional amateur radio (AR) and the emergence of the Internet. We aim to build on this overlap to foster open, accessible, and unrestricted innovation – particularly as they relate to 21st-century needs.
  • By eliminating gatekeeper technology, we enable makers, hackers, and developers to learn, experiment, and deploy using freely available knowledge, tools, and platforms.
  • Unlike commercial applications, such as traditional 5G wireless development, we focus on areas of AR and digital communications (DC) that are less likely to be funded. Open source technology efforts often fall into this category.