The Politics of Open Infrastructures - 7. OpenEdition as a Governed Milieu

7. OpenEdition as a Governed Milieu: Towards an Ecological Understanding of Open Digital Knowledge Infrastructures

Simon Dumas Primbault

©2026 Simon Dumas Primbault, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0528.07

Introduction

Infrastructures are intrinsically dynamic. As the complex assemblage of heterogeneous stakeholders and socio-technical devices in ‘trading zones’ (Galison 1997), they are constantly deteriorated by centrifugal forces that pull apart their components: hardware wear, corruption of information, unresolved controversies, loss of relevance. Deteriorating infrastructures need constant maintenance work to continue to perform their functions.

Open digital knowledge infrastructures are dynamic in their specific ways. The irruption of digital networks at the turn of the twenty-first century opened the black boxes of long-standing and integrated knowledge infrastructures such as libraries or publishing houses and redistributed actors, skills, and responsibilities. New objects emerged—e.g., digital publications and data, information exchange protocols, dissemination platforms, online indexes, open licences—together with new expertise, norms, and vocabularies. This context redefines the dynamics of knowledge infrastructures, not only because they are ever more heterogeneous and fragile, but most importantly because the negotiation of what ‘open’ means raises other issues of transparency and participation, diversity and inclusivity, community and commons (UNESCO 2021).

A diverse array of stakeholders—including infrastructure practitioners, 1 researchers, and managers across various domains—increasingly use the term ‘ecosystem’ to refer, often loosely, to this emerging configuration of infrastructures, their communities, and their surrounding environments. 2 For example, a software ecosystem may refer to a set of interoperable building blocks connected through application programming interfaces ( APIs). The book ecosystem, formerly book chain, alludes to the many steps and actors involved in the process of publication from editorial staff, to publishing standards such as ISBN, to circulation networks in digital and printed formats.

However, said stakeholders rarely take the step of explicitly defining the term ‘ ecosystem’. What does the rise of this vocabulary in the professional parlance of infrastructure practitioners reveal about shifting dynamics and the politics of open infrastructures? How do they engage with the ecological semantic field—if they engage with it at all? What representations and understandings do these professionals hold of their ‘ ecosystem,’ and how do these perspectives influence their daily practices and the governance of infrastructures?

In this contribution, I would like first to document how scholars in infrastructure studies as well as in a broad range of disciplines use the term ‘ ecosystem.’ Thanks to a brief literature review, we will see how it is discussed as a concept and serves to emphasise the need for a relational and scalar approach to socio-technical environments. Secondly, I would like to document how infrastructure practitioners use the term ‘ ecosystem’ in the context of their work. Based on a survey and four interviews with agents of OpenEdition, I will show why they use this term or not, and how this helps them frame their professional experience. Thirdly, I aim to define the term ‘ ecosystem’ as an analytical concept, emphasising the fragility of infrastructures, their specific dynamics, and the resulting need for governance both within the infrastructure itself and at its interface with the surrounding environment.

The first section of this chapter will be dedicated to the literature review (i.e., how scholars use the term ‘ ecosystem’). The second section will present and contextualise the case study (the French public infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, OpenEdition). The third section will present the results of the survey and interviews (i.e., how infrastructure practitioners use the term ‘ ecosystem’). Finally, the fourth section calls for an ecology of infrastructure whose function is to articulate the two previous levels (i.e., how I use the term ‘ ecosystem’).

1. Ecologies of Infrastructure

The emergence of ecological notions in the understanding of infrastructure can be traced back to the birth of ‘infrastructure studies’: 3 in their 1996 seminal article, Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder indeed called for an ‘ecology of infrastructure’ paying specific attention ‘to the delicate balance of language and practice across communities and parts of organizations’ ( Star and Ruhleder 1996: 117). Explicitly drawing on Gregory Bateson’s Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (1978), Star and Ruhleder were also influenced by Everett C. Hughes’ ‘human ecology’ in symbolic interactionism (Hughes 1984). Furthermore, and although they claimed that their ecology ‘is not meant to imply either a biological approach or a closed, functional systemic’ ( Star and Ruhleder 1996: 117), Star and Ruhleder’s approach was also inspired by the ecological science itself: the Long-Term Ecological Research network ( LTER) was and still is the archetypal case study of an infrastructure.

Tracing the full genealogy of such a semantic field and its uses is a long and complex task (Mounier and Dumas Primbault 2023) that will be expanded in a future publication. Interestingly enough, the fate of ecological notions was not reserved to infrastructure studies: media studies (McLuhan 1964; Fuller 2005; Taffel 2019)—especially with the advent of the internet (Kling and Scacchi 1982; Huberman 2001)—, science studies (Altman and Cohen 2022)—specifically open access (Jaime et al. 2021), open science (Thibault et al. 2023), and citizen science (Jaeger et al. 2023)—, or business literature (Davenport and Prusak 1997; Cobben et al. 2022) made use of ecology related concepts in many very different ways that later infused policy documents (ESFRI 2021; MESRI 2023) as well as common and professional parlance within infrastructures at large.

Among the many roots of the uptake of ecological notions outside the field of ecology itself, one field has had effects on the understanding of infrastructure that is not solely discursive: computing. Indeed, from a media studies perspective, the computer, and the specific materialities of the digital, have upended work practices, infrastructures, information systems, knowledge orders, and the understandings we have of them.

What Jean-Christophe Plantin et al. (2018) called the ‘splintering’ of modern knowledge infrastructures results primarily in the irruption of the digital within previously integrated and recognisable “black boxes” such as publishing houses, libraries, and bookshops in the case of scientific publishing. Under the emerging digital regime, these established entities have been compelled to adapt, accommodating a reorganisation of work, skills, and professions driven by the advent of new platforms—including within the domain of science (da Silva Neto and Chiarini 2023; Fecher et al. 2024). Plantin et al. (2016) identify the emergence of ecological dynamics with the advent of this new architecture of smaller interconnected ever-evolving building blocks:

Because they integrate many semi-independent systems, internetworks can only rarely be designed, controlled, or standardised from above; instead, fully developed infrastructures are complex ecologies whose components must continually adapt to each other’s ongoing change. ( Plantin et al. 2016: 296)

Adopting a general perspective, José van Dijck (2020) describes the global ‘ platform ecosystem’ using the ‘tree’ as a ‘constitutive metaphor’ to

help make sense of information systems as complex structures whose operative power is wielded through hierarchical and interdependent layers; these layers intertwine visibly and invisibly, belowground as well as aboveground, horizontally and also vertically. (van Dijck 2020: 2802)

The advent of the digital led both to the reshuffling of modern infrastructures and to the awareness that infrastructures—traditional and digital—have always been fragile and in tension. Between breaks and continuities, I believe that this (new) infrastructural regime requires a specific model. Previous concepts such as ‘large technical system’ (e.g., Hughes 1983, for electrical networks) dealt with infrastructures that were ‘designed, controlled, or standardized from above’ ( Plantin et al . 2016: 296). Consequently, infrastructure studies swiftly turned towards a more processual understanding, using the verb ‘to infrastructure’ (Star and Bowker 2002) or the gerund infrastructuring(e.g., Karasti and Baker 2004).

The term ‘ ecosystem’ in particular has appeared over the past decade and seems to be gradually replacing that of ‘infrastructure’ in the singular. Following the political reappraisal of ecology in sciences and technologies by Isabelle Stengers (1997), Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day (1999); and more recently Arnaud Orain (2023), I believe there can be an analytical use of ecosystem in an ‘ecology of infrastructure.’ With Ludovic Duhem (2017), I believe that:

[...] the idea that ecology is irreducible to the scientific study of ecosystems and the commitment to the protection of nature, and that it must therefore be understood in a broad sense as a relational, dynamic, scalar, and complex approach that can be applied not only to natural environments but also to artificial ones, and in particular to the digital environment, which has now become the associated milieu of our human existence, i.e. that which gives new conditions and meanings to our ways of thinking and acting. (Duhem 2017)

This contribution goes one step in that direction, attempting to translate practitioners’ ecosystemic frames of experience into an ecological framework in order to better understand how they perceive and act upon the political, technical, infrastructural dynamics of their surrounding environment.

2. Case Study

Today, OpenEdition ( OE) is a team exceeding seventy people developing and maintaining an infrastructure comprised of four online platforms dedicated to open scholarly communication in the humanities and social sciences: Journa...

Established in 1999 as Revues.org, a website designed to host and disseminate French journals in the humanities and social sciences, OE has evolved over time into a comprehensive open scholarly communication infrastructure. Originating as a grassroots initiative from a small French university (Avignon Université), led by a PhD student seeking to enhance the visibility of local history journals online, OE has undergone a process of institutionalisation over two decades.

Revues.org gradually diversified its funding sources, securing support from three additional institutions (CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université and EHESS) and receiving funding from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The organisation, renamed OpenEdition in 2011 to reflect its expanded scope, was included in 2016 in the ‘national roadmap of research infrastructures.’ Being listed alongside synchrotrons, oceanographic fleets, telescopes, and other substantial instruments had a profound influence on the organisation’s nature, shifting it definitively from a flexible network to a more structured entity.

However, OE was never formally incorporated, continuing its operations as a ‘joint unit’ supported by the same four institutions and the Research Ministry. This arrangement has ramifications for the infrastructure’s governance structure, norms, and practices. They must constantly align with and adhere to the norms and practices of its supporting institutions. For instance, no staff member is directly employed by OE. Everyone is an employee of one of the supporting institutions, which provide their personnel in-kind to OE.

In the course of its institutionalisation, governance structures evolved from a community-led endeavour focusing on and driven by researchers represented by a scientific board, to a higher-scale, institutionally backed public service operating under more pressing constraints from government agencies, funding bodies, publishers, and library consortia (Gatti et al. 2025: 28–29). Sovereignty on strategic and policy matters shifted from the scientific board to a steering committee mostly composed of representatives of the backing institutions and whose power, as we will see, is felt as a ‘top-down process.’ For the agents of OE, this integration within a much broader environment driven by specific dynamics and governance results in some opportunities, as well as a growing number of constraints and pressures to which they have to adapt in the exercise of their profession.

Tensions arise from this heterogeneity: although all are French public institutions subject to the same legal framework, they are diverse in nature. In its daily operations, OE must navigate four distinct situations: four different HR management systems, four budgets, four authentication systems, and four different management rules—while operating in a general context of chronic underfunding... This accounts in part for the infrastructure’s fragility while hindering its ability to adapt.

In this context, my objective is to understand better if and why an analytical framework based on ecological concepts is mobilised in practice by OEagents. 6 Furthermore, I would like to understand how this use attests to power dynamics both within OEand with external stakeholders. This investigation is based on a survey sent to all OE agents, followed by four semi-structured interviews with selected agents. 7

The survey and interviews were devised according to Erving Goffman’s (1974) ‘frame analysis,’ i.e., I endeavoured to analyse the metaphors and roots thereof, mobilised by actors to make sense of their professional environment, to circulate messages to counterparts, and to guide... The approach was both deductive—specifically probing the term ‘ ecosystem’ and associated ecological notions—and inductive, as, in the course of the inquiry, the *a**priori*ecosystemic frame was refined and pluralised. As we will see, this methodology will allow us not only to highlight how agents understand their situation, but also how they organise their activity—e.g., how to address a collaborator, when to perform an action in a sequence, etc.—and, eventually, how the ecosystemic frames may blur natural and social frames. Where it applied, I also prolonged our analysis in terms of ‘regimes of justification’ (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991), that is, coherent sets of arguments and norms mobilised by actors to justify their action (in this case their use or not of the term ‘ ecosystem’).

3. OpenEdition within its ‘Ecosystem’

Let us now delve into the answers to the survey and complement them with the interviews in order to qualify the types of uses and meanings of the term ‘ ecosystem’ in the context of OE and its surrounding environment.

First and foremost, one third (ten) of the respondents say they do not use the term ‘ ecosystem’ at all—most of them for intentional reasons: because there exist more appropriate synonyms (mostly ‘infrastructure’ and ‘system’); because it does not mean anything remotely concrete for them; because it is merely a ‘fashionable’ term; or because their interlocutors do not use it either. Of specific interest here concerning the politics of the infrastructure are respondents who claim to not use the term because ‘it conveys ideas they do not share.’ Two of them extensively justified this choice in a dedicated text box. One of them regrets that the use of such a term alludes to the naturalisation of socio-technical dynamics, thereby considered objective and immutable, and the reciprocal engineering of natural ecosystems—calling on the ‘Green World’ (Rougemont 2017) or the ‘Natural World’ (Demil et al. 2024) as regimes of justification. Contra this perceived reversal of properties, they emphasise the ‘political power’ to shape the dynamics of infrastructures:

The notion of a digital ecosystem (for example) and the rules that apply to it are modifiable and can be changed ex nihilo by the political, institutional, and economic constructs that humankind wants to create for itself. The danger of applying the term ecosystem to other objects is that it implies that we can play with the biological ecosystem and change its rules as we please, just as we can in other spheres. Unfortunately, this is not the case. We need to accept that we are just as powerless to change the rules of our environment (biological and physical) as we are to convince ourselves of our political power to change human-made ‘ ecosystems’ (research, digital, etc.). [FFS]

More specifically addressing matters of openness in relation to ecosystems, another loquacious respondent argues that the use of the term precisely denotes a failure of open science—thereby opposing a ‘Domestic World’ to a supposed ‘Civic World’:

In my mind, ecosystem means a closed community [entre soi]. It’s a way of acknowledging that open science is carried out by a closed community of stakeholders, and at the same time acknowledging that openness is a top-down process: from the holders of knowledge to the rest of the population. But perhaps what the notion of ecosystem underlines is precisely the limits of a not-so- open science (top-down knowledge, difficulties in applying identical open science principles in different regional contexts, etc.)? [FFS]

Chafing under the double bind to adapt on the one hand, and to abide by top-down processes in precarious conditions on the other, these two respondents refuse to use the term ecosystem because it naturalises the fragility of the infrastructure—while it is due to economic and political strategies—and thereby eschews their power to act, while said strategies could be reverted or mitigated. These arguments echo other political criticisms of the notion of ‘ ecosystem’ as being a neoliberal naturalisation of socio-technical dynamics reduced to the survival of the fittest in the competition for limited resources in a closed and self-sustaining milieu (e.g., Beatty 2014; Norris and Suomela 2017; Stiegler 2019).

Among the other two thirds (twenty) agents who use the term ‘ecosystem,’ more than half of them use it as a synonym for either ‘environment,’ ‘system,’ ‘network,’ ‘ platform,’ or ‘infrastructure.’ Depending on the context of its use and the skills and profession of the respondents...

In software development, it relates to the interconnectedness or modularity of multiple components and building blocks through protocols and APIs (e.g., ‘In a software environment, for example, an ecosystem could be a set of applications (software), whose responsibilities are different but which work together for the same purpose: network, database, data formatting, message communication, cache, data storage, user interface, etc.’ [FFS]).

In publishing, it relates to the broad production, edition, and circulation of information in different formats (e.g., ‘the environment specific to the life of books’ [FFS], ‘editorial workflow’ [FFS], ‘bibliodiversity’ [FFS], ‘publication processes’ [FFS]).

In communication, it is used in discussions with a host of heterogeneous actors outside the infrastructure (e.g., other infrastructures; users in training; the institutions of open science, such as the ministry of higher education and research or the European research council; or a broader audience in public relations).

Despite these well-identified uses, a significant number of respondents who make use of the term ‘ ecosystem’ were somewhat critical of it in the comments. Some categorise it as ‘ open science jargon’ [FFS] or ‘use it to fit the ‘mould’ and please the people I’m talking to.’ [FFS] Another agent phrased their political disagreement using the same words as one non-user mentioned above: ‘generally speaking, I’m not in favour of applying biologising or naturalising concepts to human constructs that are full of power relations’ [FFS]. Overall, respondents who use the term do so ‘for lack of a better word or out of convenience’ [FFS], for example ‘rather than talking about the environment’ [FFS]. Between intentional rejection, overwhelming use as a synonym in context, and reluctance to use it, it is important to note that the term ‘ ecosystem’ is very seldom mobilised as a proper word, i.e., not in a figurative or metaphorical way.

When asked about the scale at which the term is relevant, all respondents agree that the infrastructure OE itself cannot be conceived of as an ecosystem—it is not sufficiently large, complex, or heterogeneous. Rather, OE as an infrastructure is perceived as part of one or several wider ecosystems. Here, the previous three semantic fields emerge again: software development with an ‘ ecosystem of applications [dev] (sic)’ [FFS]; publishing with the ‘ ecosystem of scientific publishing’ [FFS], ‘ ecosystem of the book’ [FFS], or ‘informational ecosystem’ [FFS]; and communication with the ‘ ecosystem of large-scale project (European for example)’ [FFS] or ‘ open science ecosystem’ [FFS]. Broader and blurrier, ‘research ecosystem’ [FFS] and ‘digital ecosystem’ [FFS] are also mentioned.

Overall, the term is used by agents to situate themselves and their infrastructure as embedded—the first property of infrastructure for Star and Ruhleder (1996)—within a broader, more complex, and more varied context, which has certain effects on their activity—opportunities as much as constraints and pressures—, and on which they could have a certain effect through their activity—if the governance structure accommodated it. Therefore, just like the notion of infrastructure, an ‘ ecosystem’ is relational and could be akin to ‘the infrastructure’ in the singular—and thus be the object of an ‘ecology’ ( Star and Ruhleder 1996).

This analytical use of the term, which I will detail below, should not be conflated with a full-fledged ecological framework to understand infrastructures. Although one striking exception is one interviewee who expounded his view of infrastructures in context as a ‘complex system’ in the mathematical sense:

The term has come into use at a time when we are becoming aware, through the dynamics of systems [of the fragility of ecosystems]—global warming is a prism through which we can reflect on this. The visibility of this complexity [...] means that we are becoming more aware and are using more appropriate words to describe a system whose components are interdependent, because a disturbance arriving in a space they share can have deleterious effects on one or other of these components or on the system as a whole. [ITW3]

Nonetheless, the term is not significantly linked to other meaningful ecological notions and concepts. Although ‘resources,’ ‘bibliodiversity,’ and ‘predatory’ are mentioned, they do not convey biological connotations and are not used in a cogent manner together with ‘ ecosystem.’ Moreover, most respondents report using the term ‘fairly little internally’ [FFS], and mostly with specific interlocutors from outside the infrastructure: during ‘training sessions’ [FFS] for users, in ‘official and public context’ [FFS], ‘with other open science stakeholders’ [FFS], ‘with colleagues involved in European projects’ [FFS], or ‘with stakeholders close to the project’ [FFS].

Therefore, ‘ ecosystem’ seems to be mostly mobilised as a boundary object—i.e., a term plastic enough to accommodate diverse, even contradictory definitions, yet robust enough to allow the coordination of heterogeneous stakeholders (Star and Griesemer 1986)—used by agents at the interfaces between the infrastructure and its surroundings. Precisely because it has no explicit, detailed, and shared meaning but is used by a variety of stakeholders to designate vaguely their common environment and its complex dynamic, the term ‘ ecosystem’ allows for the coordination of action in this context. In that case, there is no ‘frame alignment’—that is no correspondence-making between differing frames (Snow et al. 1986)—precisely because it is the diversity of frames that ensures the polysemy of the term and its power as a boundary object.

In order to better understand the use of the term as a boundary object, one question in the survey was dedicated to clarifying what entities were in the ‘surroundings’ of OE and what kind of relationships it had with them. A set of eighteen entities and fourteen types of relationships were proposed. The aggregated results are shown in Figure 7.1, keeping types of relationships selected by more than one third of the respondents (amounting to ten types). During the interviews, subgroups (institutions, users-consumers, and users-producers) were identified and it was decided to merge international organisations with NGOs (amounting to seventeen entities).