Strengthening Information Society Research Capacity Alliance (SIRCA)

Abstract

Engaging with open development (OD) necessitates learning in which people appropriate and adopt new technologies and socio-technical practices. This typically involves informal learning (i.e. outside of formal education), and will differ between reading relationships (as a user of OD resources) and writing relationships (for full ownership or authorship of OD). If potential participants are unable to connect with existing learning networks, OD initiatives will have limited impact. Communities that aim to be 'open' may exclude people by virtue of race, language, literacies, gender, sexuality, phone/computer ownership, access to Internet or other aspects of identity. This project will explore the situated material conditions and informal learning practices that surround processes of inclusion in (and exclusion from) OD initiatives. The project will develop more detailed ethnographic and socio-material accounts of the informal learning processes and outcomes in such encounters. It will foreground the ways that global inequities of infrastructure, default identities and the cultural practices often associated with openness can “format” participation in subtle but significant ways.