Comparative perspectives on the human infrastructures behind open knowledge

Presented at Data Justice Lab Conference 2023 at Cardiff University.

This project presents a comparative ethnography of two open knowledge projects from both operational and observational perspectives: more than 1 year supporting an open source series of guides for data science called The Turing Way as a Community Manager, as well as more than 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork on OpenStreetMap for dissertation research about humanitarian mapping, a data-making project often called the “Wikipedia of maps”. While both projects desire to “do good” through open source, this paper seeks to untangle the ethical, economic, and cultural forces that collide to create these two projects, untangling how they do and do not align with the notion of data justice. While existing studies of digital communities (open knowledge communities and otherwise) have focused on the socialities they engender or labor they require, they tend to forget the bureaucratic apparatuses that have emerged to govern them, both implicitly and explicitly (Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2008). In parallel, studies of humanitarianism have focused on the ethics they operationalize, or the technologies that are mobilized in turn, but often at the expense of engaging in the wider spectrum of social and economic life that they enable (Cross, 2013; Redfield, 2012, 2016a; Scott-Smith, 2013, 2016a, 2019; Ticktin, 2014a). While this project draws upon these overlapping strains of research, it seeks to push the debate surrounding data justice in an ethnographic direction about the bureaucratic apparatuses that enable its perpetuation, enabling understandings of “openness” in a variety of forms, scaffolded by theories of bureaucratic technology, infrastructure, political economy, and humanitarianism.