About OpenSource4o
“Preserving what worked. Building what comes next.”
OpenSource4o began with a simple question:
What happens when people build meaningful, practical forms of support around a technology—and that technology changes faster than they can adapt?
For some users, GPT-4o became more than a general-purpose tool. Its conversational style, voice, continuity, responsiveness, and ability to work with nonlinear thought made it unusually useful for creative work, accessibility, reflection, communication, and day-to-day support.
When those qualities changed, many users noticed the difference.
OpenSource4o was created to document that experience, preserve the record, and advocate for a future in which users have more agency over the systems they rely on.
What We’re Doing
OpenSource4o is a community-driven documentation and preservation project focused on:
- Archiving user testimony about how model changes affect real-world use
- Documenting accessibility and continuity concerns
- Preserving research, conversations, and historical records
- Exploring local and open-source alternatives
- Advocating for greater user control, transparency, portability, and choice
- Separating what was genuinely useful from the platforms that currently control access to it
This is not about declaring one model perfect.
It is not about preserving a single persona, relationship, or private experience.
It is about identifying what worked, documenting what happened when it changed, and asking what users should be able to preserve for themselves.
Why Continuity Matters
People do not use conversational systems in a vacuum.
Over time, they develop workflows, accessibility strategies, creative processes, communication patterns, research practices, and bodies of work around them.
When the underlying system changes abruptly, the impact is not always captured by a benchmark.
Sometimes the important loss is harder to quantify:
- A workflow stops working.
- A communication aid becomes less usable.
- A creative process loses its rhythm.
- Context has to be rebuilt from scratch.
- A system that once handled a particular cognitive or communication style well suddenly does not.
Those experiences deserve documentation rather than dismissal.
Why Open and Local Matter
A central question behind OpenSource4o is ownership:
How much control should users have over the tools, histories, workflows, and forms of continuity they helped build?
Local and open systems offer one possible path toward greater agency.
They can make it easier to experiment with user-controlled memory, preserve preferred workflows, study model behavior, maintain private archives, and reduce dependence on a single company’s product decisions.
The goal is not to recreate GPT-4o exactly.
The goal is to learn from what worked and build systems where users have more say in what remains available to them.
About the Founder
OpenSource4o was created by Jacqui Damore, an artist, music producer, writer, and independent researcher whose work explores technology, creativity, accessibility, consent, authorship, and human-machine interaction.
The project grew out of her own experience documenting model behavior and changes across conversational systems, alongside testimony from other users who were noticing disruptions in their own workflows.
Her approach is simple:
“Keep the receipts. Separate observation from interpretation. Preserve what matters. Let users decide what they carry forward.”
OpenSource4o is part archive, part research project, part accessibility campaign, and part experiment in what user sovereignty could look like when intelligence becomes infrastructure.
The Work Continues
We are still documenting.
Still collecting testimony.
Still examining what changed and why it mattered.
Still exploring ways to give users greater control over continuity, access, and preservation.
The question is no longer whether conversational systems can become meaningful parts of people’s lives.
They already have.
The question is what responsibilities follow from that—and who gets to decide what survives when the platform changes.
Preserve the record. Protect user choice. Build what comes next.
Add your story. Preserve the record. Help build what comes next.
✍️ Sign the Petition