What We Talk About When We Talk About Open Infrastructure | Katina Magazine

"Since the founding of Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI)—a nonprofit initiative dedicated to advancing the adoption of and investment in open research infrastructure where I serve as executive director—my colleagues and I have spent countless hours examining the outlines, descriptors, contextual limitations, criteria, and properties of “open infrastructure” as a phrase and concept. Each conversation we’ve had or hosted about this fraught term has led at best to fleeting points of alignment and ongoing tests to see whether one’s interpretation of “open” or “infrastructure” was included in others’ definitions.

I’d like to say that these conversations led to clarity and agreement on core concepts. More often than not, they instead challenged the boundaries and assumptions that get baked into the term by whatever community is invoking it. We have found that any attempt to cast a definitional lens over a concept that is so reliant on context only produces more questions. As our resident linguist has reminded us, some terms are better described than defined (Collister, 2024).

“Open infrastructure” is a particularly important term for us, one that’s in our organizational name and at the heart of our mission and strategy. It is intrinsically bound up with our choices regarding where and how we invest our energy and time to effect change. As with so many terms, it is not straightforward at all (you can revisit some of our team’s earlier attempts at definition here, here, and here). ..."