The Politics of Open Infrastructures

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.