Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices

This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts.

Bringing together scholars from science and technology studies, critical data studies, media studies, organisation studies, arts-based research and political sociology, this edited volume explores openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. The book moves from the partial openness of early Internet standards and free and open source software, through contested practices of opening government data and public infrastructures, to struggles over inclusion and governance in scholarly and cultural knowledge infrastructures. This is followed by community-driven experiments in care, repair and alternative openness and concludes with forward-looking contributions on how to keep infrastructures open for research, how to fund infrastructures as digital commons and how to mobilise open infrastructures for democratic resilience and economic sovereignty.

The contributions trace how principles such as accessibility, transparency, participation and collective stewardship are enacted in practice—and how they are challenged by commercial capture, asymmetries of expertise, cultural governance and geopolitical inequalities. Across theoretical chapters and rich empirical case studies, the book investigates the governance of open infrastructures, the politics of alternative technological arrangements and struggles for epistemic justice within knowledge systems.

By foregrounding power relations, ethical tensions and questions of responsibility, this book rethinks openness as a site of political negotiation rather than a technical solution. The volume offers critical insights for researchers, policymakers, engineers and civil society actors concerned with digital commons, democratic governance and the future of open knowledge infrastructures in increasingly contested political and technical environments.

A companion website, www.openinfrastructures.net , extends the volume through author interviews, supplementary materials and additional resources that document the making of the book and provide further insights into the debates on governing, sustaining, and contesting open digital knowledge infrastructures.

Editors: Katja Mayer, Astrid Mager, Renée Ridgway

Table of contents

Introduction: The Politics of Open Digital Knowledge Infrastructures

Astrid Mager, Katja Mayer, Renée Ridgway

1. Send Conservatively, Accept Liberally: Cultural Governance of Open Internet Standards

Corinne Cath 

2. From Free Software to Open Source: Traversing the Terminologies, Values and Ethics of an Open Knowledge Infrastructure

Renée Ridgway

3. The Internet Infrastructure Has Never Been Open

Niels ten Oever

4. Infrastructuring Openness: Austrian Practices and Politics of Opening Up Government Data

Astrid Mager

5. The Future of Urban Waste: From Closed Systems to Open Waste Data Infrastructure

Celina Strzelecka

6. The Politics of Federated Protocols: Openness Organised through Digital Sovereignty

Francesca Musiani

7. OpenEdition as a Governed Milieu: Towards an Ecological Understanding of Open Digital Knowledge Infrastructures

Simon Dumas Primbault

8. The Politics of Infrastructuring Inclusivity: DOAJ and its Ambassador Programme

Ivonne Lujano Vilchis, Katrine Sundsbø, Ina Smith, Joanna Ball

9. Paradoxes of Openness: Power, Reciprocity, and the Governance of Scholarly Infrastructures

Katja Mayer

10. From Data to Display: Infrastructures of Openness in the Making

Lucie Kolb , Lara Kothe

11. Beyond the Digital Divide: Data Governance and Indigenous Sovereignty in Andean Potato Conservation

Julio Sebastián Zárate Vásquez , Jason A. Delborne

12. Opening Network Infrastructures: The Sociomaterial Politics of Openness in Grassroots Community Networks

Stefano Crabu

13. From Permacomputing to Agbogbloshie: Open-Knowledge Infrastructures for Computational Repair

Cyrus Khalatbari

14. Controversial Openness, an Exploration of Open Image Generation Assemblages

Nicolas Malevé

15. Infrastructuring openness or opening infrastructures?

Annalisa Pelizza, Renée Ridgway

16. (Trans)action Cycles: New Resource Architectures for a Digital Commons

Katharina Meyer

17. Open Digital Infrastructures for Democratic Resilience and Economic Sovereignty

Leonhard Dobusch , Maximilian Heimstädt