Open Wire is a real-time platform that aggregates and clusters crowd-sourced media — photos, videos, and reports — from citizen journalists around the world. Events are detected automatically when multiple independent sources report from the same location and time.
Every piece of content on Open Wire is captured by real people, in real places, at real times. We believe in the power of decentralized, first-person journalism to provide unfiltered perspectives on world events.
Memories — photos, videos, and text reports — are submitted by contributors through the Collective Memory network. Our systems automatically cluster related memories into events based on geographic proximity, temporal overlap, and semantic similarity.
Each event page aggregates multiple independent perspectives, creating a multi-source, verifiable picture of what happened. Confidence scores reflect how many independent sources corroborate each event.
All media on Open Wire is user-generated — captured by real people using their own devices. We do not generate, fabricate, or AI-produce any visual or video content. Where AI is used (such as for event summaries or search), it is clearly labeled as "AI-generated."
Unless otherwise noted, content on Open Wire is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
You are free to: share and display the material for personal, educational, journalistic, and other non-commercial purposes — provided you give appropriate credit with a link to the original page and the creator's profile.
You may not: use the content for any commercial purpose — including but not limited to advertising, paid media, merchandise, or commercial publications — without explicit written consent from the creator.
AI & machine learning: Using any media from Open Wire for AI model training, fine-tuning, dataset construction, or any automated learning system is strictly prohibited without individual creator consent. Each piece of media is the intellectual property of its creator.
Commercial licensing: To license media for commercial use, contact the creator directly through the "License for Commercial Use" button on any memory page, or email licensing@open-wire.org.
For inquiries, partnerships, or press requests, reach out at hello@open-wire.org.