The article examines the role of social media groups for online freelance workers in the Philippines—digital workers obtaining “gigs” from online labor platforms such as Upwork and Onlinejobs.ph—for social facilitation and collective organizing. The article first problematizes labor marginality in the context of online freelance platform workers situated in the middle of competing narratives of precarity and opportunity. We then examine unique forms of solidarity emerging from social media groups formed by these geographically spread digital workers. Drawing from participant observation in online freelance Facebook groups, as well as interviews and focus groups with 31 online freelance workers located in the cities of Manila, Cebu, and Davao, we found that online Filipino freelancers maintain active social interaction and exchange that can be construed as “entrepreneurial solidarities.” These solidarities are characterized by competing discourses of ambiguity, precarity, opportunity, and adaptation that are articulated and visualized through ambient socialities. While we argue that these entrepreneurial solidarities do not reflect a passive and simplistic acceptance of neoliberal discourses about digital labor by digital workers, the solidarities forged in these groups also work to undermine their resistive potential such that these tend to reinforce rather than impose pressure toward critical structural changes that can improve the viability of digital labor conditions.

Applying the ‘Rural Livelihoods’ framework of analysis, this study explores the link between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and rural poverty reduction by analyzing the role of community telecenters in enhancing the livelihood strategies of rural poor households. The ‘Rural Livelihoods’ framework argues that interventions that play a role in facilitating an increase in the poor's livelihood assets and resources and facilitate diversified livelihoods have a potential for reducing poverty. Using telecenters set up by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the China Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) in selected rural villages in Wu'an, China as case studies, the paper explores the direct and indirect role that telecenters play in facilitating the poor's access to more livelihood resources and assets and in influencing the adoption of diverse livelihood strategies. Findings show that while the intensity of the changes experienced cannot support the claims about the transformative role of telecenters on the rural poor, these have some positive implications on certain aspects of rural poverty. These implications extend not only to economic aspects (such as better earnings or production), but to human (such as e‐literacy and new farming techniques) and social (such as creation of venues for community integration and knowledge sharing) dimensions. The paper gives emphasis on specific conditions and factors that motivate rural communities to use telecenter facilities and obtain useful information, and those that facilitate the translation of information into the construction of diversified livelihood strategies.

Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access for and empowering the margins through data exchanged on the global free market, hegemonic Open Science processes co-opt and erase Southern epistemologies, working to create and reproduce new enclosures of extraction that serve data colonialism-capitalism. In this essay, drawing on our ongoing negotiations of community-led culture-centered advocacy and activist strategies that resist the racist, gendered, and classed structures of neocolonial knowledge production in the metropole in the North, we attend to Southern practices of Openness that radically disrupt the whiteness of hegemonic Open Science. These decolonizing practices foreground data sovereignty, community ownership, and public ownership of knowledge resources as the bases of resistance to the colonial-capitalist interests of hegemonic Open Science.

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The open science (OS) movement has advocated for increased transparency in certain aspects of research. Communication is taking its first steps toward OS as some journals have adopted OS guidelines codified by another discipline. We find this pursuit troubling as OS prioritizes openness while insufficiently addressing essential ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Some recommended open science practices increase the potential for harm for marginalized participants, communities, and researchers. We elaborate how OS can serve a marginalizing force within academia and the research community, as it overlooks the needs of marginalized scholars and excludes some forms of scholarship. We challenge the current instantiation of OS and propose a divergent agenda for the future of Communication research centered on ethical, inclusive research practices.