Introduction

This introduction situates open digital knowledge infrastructures within contemporary debates on digital sovereignty, platform power, and the governance of shared technological resources. Recent infrastructural failures and geopolitical interventions have revealed how deeply public authority and knowledge circulation depend on privately operated digital infrastructures. In response, openness is increasingly invoked as a political remedy. Yet openness is often reduced to a formal attribute rather than understood as an infrastructural achievement requiring sustained coordination, resourcing, and collective stewardship. The chapter develops an analytical framework that brings together knowledge, infrastructure, and politics to conceptualise openness as a contested sociotechnical accomplishment. Drawing on science and technology studies and infrastructure research, it argues that digital knowledge infrastructures are material and institutional arrangements through which knowledge is produced, stabilised, and circulated. Openness, in this perspective, is neither a fixed property nor a purely normative ideal, but an ongoing process that structures inclusion and exclusion, participation and control.To make this framework analytically productive, the introduction outlines three crosscutting dimensions that guide the volume: sociotechnical complexities, platformisation, and infrastructural politics. Together, these lenses foreground the labour and coordination work required to sustain openness, the reorganisation of infrastructures through platform power, and the governance struggles that shape access, authority, responsibility, and epistemic in/justices. By reframing openness as a matter of infrastructural politics rather than technical design alone, the chapter establishes the conceptual foundations for the empirical contributions that follow and positions open digital knowledge infrastructures as key sites of power negotiation in contemporary societies.