About

WMA Open is part of WMA which is a series of non-profit programmes developed to spark awareness and engage the public on social issues of great importance to Hong Kong through visual images, with a view to fostering positive societal change. WMA believes that art can be a powerful means to raise the awareness of social concerns. Each year, a theme is chosen for the programmes. Previous themes included “Poverty”, “Air”, “Waste”, “Identity”, “Mobility”, “Transition”, and “Opportunity”. The current theme is “Light”.

Among the programmes, WMA Open has started an open archive of Hong Kong images since 2012. The archive is made up by images submitted by members of the public under WMA annual themes. The main objectives of WMA Open are to enrich the archive in the purpose of documenting contemporary Hong Kong by images and also, to share the images under the Creative Commons (CC) license arrangement with the intention of inspiring and enriching research, education and discussions on Hong Kong. In the past 7 years, WMA Open hosted photo contests with prizes annually to attract the public’s interest in participation. The programme successfully worked around the little-known concept of public archive and accumulated over 7,000 images through public submissions in its archive under the arrangement of Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Since 2019, Hong Kong has gone through substantial social transformations and the concept of crowdsourcing has become more familiar among the society. WMA Open hopes to reinvent itself to its original intent, an open digital image archive for Hong Kong aiming to preserve the collective memory of Hong Kong and share the valuable resources for those interested in Hong Kong.

WMA Open invites the general public to submit their images and together build the open archive of images in Hong Kong under the current WMA theme. The images submitted will be added to the archive and shared under the arrangement of Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Hong Kong License.