Updating Open Development: Open Practices in Inclusive Development

Making Open Scholarship More Equitable and Inclusive

“…As our population becomes more digital, many are caught in a cycle of poverty, with the digital divide furthering their lack of engagement and representation [6,36,41]. To facilitate greater social inclusion and equity for all, the use of digital tools and processes requires the collective design of more open and collaborative networks to engage a richer diversity of communities [4,27]. We argue that one approach to achieving this is to implement the seven principles proposed in the OCSDNet Manifesto, which is focused on (i) enabling a knowledge commons where all individuals have the means to decide how their knowledge is governed and managed to address their needs; (ii) recognizing cognitive justice and the need for diverse understandings of knowledge-making to co-exist in scientific production; (iii) practicing situated openness by addressing the ways in which context, power, and inequality condition scientific research; (iv) advocating for each individual's right to research and enabling different forms of participation at all stages of the research process; (v) fostering equitable collaboration between scientists and social actors, and cultivating co-creation and social innovation in society; (vi) incentivizing inclusive infrastructures that empower people of all abilities to make and use accessible open-source technologies; and (vii) using knowledge as a pathway to sustainable development [35].…”

“…While open scholarship is an international movement with the potential to provide substantial benefits for universities, businesses, governments, and non-governmental organizations across the world, it also involves a complex array of power relations that may not always be consistent with the goal of inclusive, equitable development [2]. Open scholarship policies, technologies, standards, and models have stemmed primarily from the global North and been applied to the global South, creating new categories of exclusion, with the risk of exacerbating the legacies of colonialist systems of scholarly communication and further disadvantaging the needs or aspirations of diverse, marginalized groups [4]. Initiatives are underway to scale up international collaboration for more transparent, equitable cooperation toward openness to address persistent tensions between those managing scholarly outputs and developing data, tools, software, publications, and workflows, and those promoting an open knowledge environment.…”

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).…”