The project is grounded in a user-centered design philosophy that emphasizes personal autonomy in spiritual practice and expression: In case studies, the individual centered nature of the project has been recognized alternately as an expression of post-denominational Judaism[4] and open-source religion,[5] and for permitting individuals to "[engage] in a transformative endeavour independent of historical elites.

The project also defines itself as inclusive, "[inviting] participation without prejudice towards ethnic heritage, skin color, nationality, belief or non-belief, sex, gender, sexuality or any other consideration.

"[7] The project was conceived in 2001 when Aharon Varady began studying PERL and MySQL while working at Datarealm Internet Services, a webhosting company then located in Philadelphia.

[8] Varady has cited a number of inspirations for the project: the essay "Immediatism" by Peter Lamborn Wilson; the do-it-yourself ethos and the Arts and Crafts Movement of William Morris and his Kelmscott Press; the work of bespoke artisans and master book artists in Neil Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age; the illustration of textual metadata in Rabbi Jacob Freedman's unpublished Siddur Bays Yosef (Polychrome Historical Prayer Book); the free culture movement advanced by Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessig; and experiences with Jewish pluralism in the grassroots intentional community, Jews in the Woods.

In the summer of 2009, the project was publicly launched with the support of Josh Kopelman and the PresenTense Institute, an incubator for social entrepreneurship in Jerusalem.

[19] The Open Siddur Project advocates within the Jewish community for the use of free-culture compatible open-source licenses as a collaborative strategy for sharing creative content intended for public and private spiritual practice.

Varady sees this effort as an expression of the traditional value of Rabbinic Jewish discourse, dimus parrhesia (דימוס פרהסיא, Aramaicized Greek meaning to participate freely and openly), and as being a proper and careful steward of Torah by creating a system supporting correct attribution of scholarly and creative work within an intellectual Commons.

Aharon Varady completed a digital transcription of the Pri Etz Hadar seder for Tu biShvat along with a free-culture licensed translation by Rabbi Dr.

Beginning in 2009 with a discussion list hosted on Google Groups, a community of scholars, educators, artists, and other Jewish liturgy enthusiasts has coalesced around the project.

[6] Gabrielle Girau Pieck researched the Open Siddur Project for a case study in her Masters thesis, Jewish Theology after Google: Post-Rabbinic and Post-Denominational Judaisms in a Digitized World (University of Basel, 2014).

[23] Project members have presented at NewCAJE (2010, 2011), LimmudNY (2010, 2013), Le Mood Montreal (2013), and at the EVA/Minerva 10th Annual Conference on Digitization & Culture at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem (2013).

Efraim Feinstein has published an article with Devorah Preiss on the Open Siddur Project in the Lookstein Journal of Jewish Educational Leadership.