15. Infrastructuring openness or opening infrastructures?

This interview between co-editor Renée Ridgway and Annalisa Pelizza focuses on the notion of ‘opening infrastructures’ and how we can know, methodologically study and open infrastructures up, along with making them more symmetrical, just and fair by following power. Power is the result of how a relationship unfolds. An infrastructure doesn't ‘have’ power because ‘infrastructuring’ is always about arranging relations and such relations are dynamic, multiple and contingent. ‘Infrastructuring’ is a set of practices that extend in time and space, often unknown beforehand but containing boundaries that are a network of practices, with artifacts and actors, humans or non-humans emerging through practices. In Pelizza’s research on governmental information infrastructures that explores interoperability in two different contexts (Italy and the Netherlands), openness is not defined a priori by the fact that open source software is used, rather an infrastructure can be multiple and contingent. Further research on registration and identification centers of migrants at European borders, so-called ‘Hotspots,’ investigates very low-tech artifacts (bracelets) that have multiple agencies between actors (humans, NGOs and the state apparatus). Highlighting the tensions of ‘contingency’ and ‘obduracy,’ the interview puts forth that information infrastructures are made of heterogeneous elements that produce more new legislation, new organizations, de facto new actors yet are also made of laws, or organizational practices and people. ‘Infrastructuring openness’ is about producing data; instead ‘opening infrastructures’ is about producing communities.