Untangling the frictions and cohesions between (digital) democracy and open source

Presented at 'Moving frontiers of the demos: Enfranchisement, youth participation, and digital technologies' conference in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies on 12-14 June 2023

Where does “open source” fit into discussions around (digital) democracy? When we discuss “digital transformations” by and for communities, from where – and for whom – are these transformations developing? In the present day, the notion of “open” seems to be ubiquitous: from OpenAI’s groundbreaking ventures in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs) (1), to the European Commission’s upcoming “open source software strategy” as a part of their Cyber Resilience Act (2). While these parallel developments highlight the urgency of the current discourse, the socio-technical histories of “open” have a much longer history that are important to untangle in order to understand both their frictions and cohesions (3).  This presentation will aim to untangle these threads, as informed by ethnographic study of two open source communities: more than one year supporting an open source series of guides for data science called The Turing Way as a Community Manager, as well as more than 1.5 years of academic fieldwork with OpenStreetMap, a data-making project often called the “Wikipedia of maps”. While this work draws upon these overlapping strains of research, it seeks to push the debate surrounding digital democracy and digital democracy in an ethnographic direction, untangling understandings “openness” as they are lived in real time, as scaffolded by theories of bureaucratic technology, infrastructure, political economy, and humanitarianism.