CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing knowledge and materialartefacts can be found everywhere, from the free/libre and open-source software movement to citizenscience initiatives, and from community-based fabrication laboratories and makerspaces to theproduction of open-source scientific hardware. Spurred on by the widespread availability of networkeddigital infrastructure, what such initiatives share in common is the (re)creation of knowledge commons,and an attempt to redistribute innovative agency across a broad array of actors.In this working paper we reflect on what these emerging practices might mean for helping to cultivatemore equitable and sustainable patterns of global development. For many commentators and activistssuch initiatives promise to radically alter the ways in which we produce knowledge and materialartefacts ? in ways that are far more efficient, creative, distributed, decentralised, and democratic. Suchpossibilities are intriguing, but also not without critical challenges.We argue that key to appreciating if and how collaborative, commons-based production can fulfil suchpromises and contribute to more equitable and sustainable patterns of development, are a series ofchallenges concerning the knowledge politics and political economy of the new practices. We ask: whatdepths and forms of participation are being enabled through the new practices? In what sense doesopenness translate into the ability to use knowledge? Who is able to influence and control open andcollaborative production? Who is able to allocate resources to, and to capture benefits from, the newinitiatives? And will open and collaborative forms of production create new relations with, or eventransform, markets, states, and civil society, or will they be captured by sectional interests?

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