# Additional Discussion Last updated: 2023-01-16 URL for this page: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/COIs-additional URL for site: https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/COIs ## Transformative Influence ### Beyond openness Large parts of the current scholarly ecosystem still operate on dated models of scholarship created in an ivory tower of excellence—expressed through closed and opaque review processes, exclusionary publishing systems in the hand of for-profit corporation, or the preference of Western ways of creating and sharing knowledge, which have been [criticized for reproducing colonial norms](https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:26133/). One response to create change towards community-based scholarship and research, seems to be the rallying call for open science and, more recently, open infrastructures. But what exactly does the open mean in open infrastructures? Is there a set of common values and principles among efforts and initiatives such as open access, open source technologies, open peer review, open data and open infrastructure? While most advocates seem to agree on the value and importance of more transparency, accountability, equity and collaboration in scholarship, recent years have also brought the less-desirable sides of openness to its surface. The use of “[open washing](https://blog.okfn.org/2014/03/10/open-washing-the-difference-between-opening-your-data-and-simply-making-them-available/)”, [questionable practices of incentivizing and measuring openness](https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/how-not-to-incentivise-open-research/), or the risk of [exacerbating existing inequalities](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00724-0) are some examples which reinforce the question of what open means and how it should be implemented. At IOI, we therefore embarked on a journey to revisit our understanding of openness in the context of the services, technologies, and tools that enable scholarly practices—in other words the infrastructure of scholarship and research. Guided by our work on a technosocial understanding of infrastructure, it was important to not only focus on the technological properties of open infrastructure but also consider the social properties such as the organizational structure of the service provider or conditions of service delivery. With this conceptual foundation in mind, our research on the state of public funding data and hidden costs of operating open infrastructure confirmed that openness as a shared value and principle is expressed in many different ways. To overcome this de decided to go beyond open and elaborate the desired properties and structures of open infrastructure along three key dimensions of open infrastructures. ### Resilient technologies: From ownership towards stewardship Stories of the discontinuation of relied-on services—due to the failure of infrastructure organizations as businesses or the simple lack of profitability to the shareholders—demonstrate why responsible community infrastructures need to be built on resilient technologies. To ensure that a diverse set of interests is served with the long-term benefit of the community in mind, the underlying technologies need to be forkable and as independent as possible from the owners at any point in time. We therefore suggest a model of technology stewardship rather than ownership would be better suited to meet the needs of responsible community infrastructures for research and scholarship. Such a model of technology stewardship would include open and reusable technologies and data at the heart of infrastructures which implement and contribute to open standards, public documentation for technical processes involved in the development and operations of the technology, an implemented data management plan, and minimal external dependencies on proprietary software, data, or standards. ### Accountable organizations: Prioritizing stakeholders over shareholders With (or without) a resilient technological base in place, the question emerges how and why a community should put their trust in certain infrastructures, especially when it’s unclear whether the interests of shareholders are prioritized over those of the stakeholders. Thus, for communities to build on accountable infrastructures, we propose to support those that center community interests and community responsiveness in their organizational structure. This might include affording governance to stakeholders, operational transparency & mechanisms of accountability, a community-driven mission that is aligned with community needs rather than profit generation, and regard for the rights of other stakeholders such as employees and users. This also moves beyond the non-profit vs for-profit binary, in examining how an organization operates to fulfill its mission and serve the community, the health of leadership structures, and community responsiveness. ### Equitable & inclusive services: Removing (infra)structural barriers As previously stated, IOI understands that infrastructure is fundamentally entangled with community. This means an infrastructure is not only determined by its technological and organizational structure but also by the needs and intentions of the communities it serves. In centering community, we are also centering questions of power and justice through the lens of services. It is, therefore, important to question who designed the services an infrastructure offers and for whom. Acknowledging the legacy of colonialism and imperialism in research and scholarship, we ask which communities and practices have been and are still excluded to develop inclusive designs for infrastructural services. Similarly, embracing an intersectional, feminist lens, projects can attempt to address and remove further (infra)structural inequities based on race, gender, sex, class, sexuality, or disability to ensure equitable access to those services. Finally, community engagement should not be a one-way street of knowledge extraction but instead constitute an exchange of knowledge and power. ![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/B1rnZ7vBq.png) *Figure 1.* A summary of the three dimensions of open infrastructures. Each dimension additionally contains a subset of desirable characteristics that we identify as properties of infrastructures with transformative influence. ## Community Engagement ### Redistributing Agency “‘Community’ is a slippery concept” is the opening statement of an [article reflecting on a workshop about the meaning of community](https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/copim-community-governance-workshop-recap-part-2/release/1) by Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). As many others, we encountered the foundational question of defining community early on in our research and, similar to many others before us, have been struggling to find definitive answers. Thus, our current working definition of community is aligned with Leigh Star’s use of communities of practice that are also central to the conceptualization of infrastructure. A community of practice is a “group of people joined by conventions, language, practices, and technology” and is not necessarily contained by a single spatial territory (see See Star, S. L., Bowker, G. C., & Neumann, L. J. (2003). Communities of Practice. Digital Library Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation, 241.). However, not every community in the scholarly realm is the same. For instance, the community of users of Mendeley—a commercial product owned by Elsevier—is different to the Zotero community—an open source reference manager—in the way it engages and positions itself to the provided service. We suggest conceptualizing this difference through the distribution of agency between community and infrastructure. A highly engaged community is participating in the shaping of the organization, technology, and service delivery of open infrastructure. In contrast, disengaged communities would use a service without participating in governance activities. At IOI, we believe that open infrastructure co-create scholarly services with their communities rather. With this basic definition of community, we can describe the relationship between open infrastructures–expressed through the three dimensions of infrastructures–and their respective communities–expressed through individuals and a collective. A tempting approach, especially in an ecosystem that funds projects rather than services, is to distinguish between the infrastructure and its community. This type of thinking might also be reflected in the lack of funding for community management. However, Star’s sociomaterial framing of infrastructure with its emphasis on practices, pushes for a different model that considers community as constitutive of infrastructures. In our model, this is reflected in the centering of services which are co-determined by infrastructural as well as community based elements. A service entails a technology that provides a concrete affordance to an individual user. However, usage alone isn’t enough to qualify an infrastructure service. Additionally, that individual is a member of a collective with shared practices afforded to the community through the social organization of the infrastructure. This model (see figure 2) centers the concept of a service in our understanding of infrastructures while providing a frame to connect both sociomaterial properties of infrastructures as well as communities of shared practices. ![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/ryR6MQwHq.png) *Figure 2.* The service delivery model for infrastructure centers practices and affordances as the connection between infrastructure and community. Neither infrastructure nor community are more important than the other. With this model laid out, we can now attempt to locate and describe community engagement through relations between the elements of infrastructures. Inspired by the community participation model developed by the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE), we understand community engagement as different types of distributions of agency within the model. In the commercial model of infrastructure services, typically the managing organization would make decisions about the organization, technology, as well as service delivery. The community would only be using the service—or consuming in the CSCCE model—without participating in the shaping of the infrastructure. The opposite case is when a community can participate in the shaping of organizational structures (e.g., through means of community governance) or the technology itself (e.g., direct user contributions in open source projects). In the community participation model this mode would align with collaborative or co-creative environments. The difference between these two extremes can be understood as a redistribution of agency from infrastructure owner to the community. Lastly, by combining the service delivery model of infrastructure with the concepts of transformative influence and community engagement, the following model for an open infrastructure service emerges. ![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/BynlmXPS9.png) *Figure 3.* Open infrastructure expressed in the service delivery model. --- ## See also * Archived copy of this page (via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine): https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://hackmd.io/@investinopen/COIs-additional --- This page first published: 2022-05-08 ###### tags: `cois-documentation` --- <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is made available under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>. Users are free to share, remix, and adapt this work. (Please attribute [Invest in Open Infrastructure](https://investinopen.org/) in any derivative work).