Introduction: Governing Openness in an Unequal World

Abstract

not. Finally, the chapter connects openness and governance of the knowledge commons, which are important to the open development puzzle overall and to the analysis in this book. Openness, Inclusion, and DevelopmentOpenness, inclusion, and development are tricky concepts to unpack and to understand. The term "openness" has multiple meanings and interpretations, associated as it is with a verb (to open), a noun (openness), and an adjective (an open door). And, of late, a wide range of online content and social practices have coopted the term to give ideas, platforms, and applications a veneer of availability or transparency. Indeed, "open" is increasingly associated with nearly anything available on the Internet.Inclusion and development are similarly contested concepts. In the contexts in which IDRC works, "to include" and "to develop" (or "Who is included?" and "What is development?") are normative statements (and questions) that are built on assumptions about optimizing the good for the greatest number, and on goals of supporting human beings in their quest to achieve their highest aspirations. Yet unpacking inclusion and development into calculable, knowable, empirical notions is not an easy task. As goals-or rather, pillars-both seem to be a function of unique experience and positionality. For example, indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP) show something about a context in which people are living, but they do not speak to genuine happiness or well-being (which, at least for some, development and inclusion are meant to support). You can imagine, then, that combining ill-defined concepts to describe open development might cause confusion, and, in our experience, it has. Indeed, some argue that a singular definition is undesirable and ultimately hypocritical, as it closes off other alternatives (Davies et al. 2013). Fortunately, complete agreement on a singular definition is not essential in order for learning to occur. But to help bridge at least some of these communication gaps, we have focused on a definition of "open" as it exists in practice (which is spelled out in detail in chapter 2) so there can be clarity about the actual practices under discussion. We might not all agree with the use (or not) of the word "open," but we can point to an activity happening in the world as signifying an open practice. We have found this to be a fruitful approach.In contrast to our attempts to achieve some clarity with the concepts of open and openness, we have allowed for flexibility around the meaning of and perspectives on development and inclusion across the contributions in this volume. As Global North

Setting data free: The politics of open data for food and agriculture

“…Scholars have noted that while openness is compatible with a myriad of development approaches, those that dominate tend to be the technocratic, neoliberal models that equate openness with productivity and efficiency (Bentley et al, 2021). Often imported wholesale from the Global North, such approaches have limited utility across diverse global contexts, particularly as they rarely acknowledge the (Northern) values they embody or adequately address barriers to digital access at sites of implementation (Smith and Seward, 2020). Like other data for development (D4D) initiatives, open data projects often prioritize extracting local data for multinational humanitarian, research, or economic uses over public access or domestic partnerships for local development (Mann, 2018), sometimes without full consideration of the risks posed to data subjects (Taylor, 2016).…”