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, and political sociology, this edited volume explores openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. 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. Cases range from open internet standards and public sector data infrastructures to community networks, generative image platforms, feminist archives, agrobiodiversity databases, open access publishing, and open-source intelligence in conflict reporting.
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 environments.
A companion website for this volume is available at https://openinfrastructures.net/
Katja Mayer - a sociologist at University of Vienna and the Center for Social Innovation, ZSI, - operates at the intersection of social sciences and knowledge infrastructures, specializing in Open Science, Citizen Science, and critical data studies. Her research interrogates power dynamics in digital knowledge commons. She has served as an expert for the European Commission, and has taught Critical Data Studies at TU Munich and the University of Lucerne among others. She is currently finalizing her research project on the "Politics of Openness: Open data practices in the computational social sciences". She has been co-editing several special issues, such as recently Frontiers in Big Data: "Critical data and algorithm studies" (2023), or FTEval journal on "Participatory Evaluation and Impact Assessment in Citizen Science" (2022), or "Citizen social science - active citizenship versus data commodification" (2020) in Nature - Humanities and Social Science Communications.
Astrid Mager is Senior Academy Scientist at the Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA), Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), and lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna. Her current research includes AI ethics in global contexts, algorithmic sorting and discrimination, as well as open data infrastructures and automation in European welfare states. In 2024, Astrid finished her habilitation "Algorithmic Imaginaries. Visions and values in the shaping of search engines" at the University of Vienna. Her recent co-editorships include "The State of Google Critique and Intervention" for Big Data & Society (2023, together with O.C. Norocel and R. Rogers) and "Future Imaginaries in the Making and Governing of Digital Technology" for New Media & Society (2021, together with C. Katzenbach).
Renée Ridgway is a Post-Doc in the SHAPE centre at the department of Digital Design and Information Studies and BTECH, Aarhus University, DK. Situated at the interstices of feminist STS, media theory and critical data/AI studies, her interdisciplinary research focuses on search as a knowledge infrastructure: addressing the problematics, politics and ethical aspects of Google search through public workshops and data visualisations, its alternatives (European public index, FOSS applications for search) and the so-called future of search (Generative AI/chatbots). Past co-editorships include "Another Publication" with Revolver Books (2006, together with K. Zdjelar), "Revelation of the Concealed" with Onomatopee (2012, together with F. Lomme). Presently she is preparing a digital anthology "Open Web Index" with the open access Living Books about History.
