Beyond openness, toward the common? The role of open technologies in socio-environmental research.

What is the role that the “common” plays in contemporary socio-environmental research and action? “Open” environmental research technologies—such open scientific software, open data, and open scientific hardware—have returned to the forefront of debate concerning the present and future of participatory knowledge-making. Governments, international agencies, funding organizations, and community projects have renewed hope for the purported cross-pollination effects of “open technologies,” promising large-scale collaborations with increased efficacy in the application and reuse of public funds, but also renewed forms of solidarity across groups. Yet, skepticism with “openness” has been rampant given the actual and potential cases of corporate enclosures of collective efforts and research outputs that have been made public. In this article, we discuss the experience of a distributed network of environmental activists, open technology practitioners, and STS researchers studying the production of “open technologies” for socio-environmental research named “SEEKCommons” (Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons). Drawing from the debate on the “socio-environmental question” in the context of Latin American social movements, we debate the alternative that “communality” and “conviviality” as technopolitical practices afford in creating concrete alternatives to developmentist policy through the “digitalization” of nature in contemporary “data-driven” environmental research. We present the collective work that was developed by SEEKCommons to realize a double agenda: to contribute to the study of common tools and infrastructures for STS research about socio-environmental concerns while helping to build such infrastructures. For this purpose, we developed a fellowship program, a series of community activities, such as talks and gatherings, and funded several socio-environmental projects to advance our understanding of the state of “open technologies for socio-environmental research.” As a contribution to STS, we developed a “translational” approach across three fundamental axes that organized the SEEKCommons project (socio-environmental action, STS research, and Open technology development) that was aimed at working out the contradictions of operating with open technologists in a hostile environment, but also developing a collaborative approach to collective STS scholarship in an increased individualized and competitive academic environment with the commercialization and platformization of the sciences. For the conclusion, we will discuss the practical lessons we learned from the network in terms of the benefits and challenges of building bridges across disparate domains (such as open technology development and socio-environmental research) having STS as a “translational device.”