Knowledge Networks and the Politics of Protocols

Abstract

Building tools that allow users to provision, operate, maintain, and govern their own instances of an application is one of the most politically potent acts possible in open-source software development. In essence, doing so creates a new commons: a shared forum within which communities of users can act, interact, and organize. Although the developers of such tools may intend for them to be broadly accessible, the tools themselves can never be truly politically neutral. Developers inevitably have to make subjective decisions that have downstream consequences, structuring and/or delimiting the action space available to users – hence cyborg anthropologist Amber Case’s claim that “design is governance.”1 The relationship between these design choices and their eventual outcomes, however, is often invisible to both software users (who have limited insight into the development process) and developers (who are often too far removed from specific instancing processes to recognize the ways that their decisions have shaped such processes in advance).