A new Global Information Society Watch special edition is launching this year on 4 September, during the upcoming Global Gathering, under the theme "Free/libre and open source software: Visions of openness from the Global South." Below, we are publishing the introduction to this edition in full in advance, providing an overview of the content to come. The full edition will be available online on the same day at giswatch.org.
Introduction: From the edges
The nine reports published in this special edition of Global Information Society Watch offer powerful arguments for the decolonisation of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS), and the revitalisation of the FLOSS movement through a stronger identification with marginalised communities in the Global South. They ask questions about the origins of the movement, and what “openness” really means when FLOSS has “become structural to the world’s biggest fortunes” (Ada LaNerd). They consider the persistent exclusion of the Global South from participation in FLOSS governance and sustainable funding opportunities, despite an increasing number of developers from these regions contributing to global FLOSS communities. They point out how these structural exclusions are not confined to countries in the Global South. They identify what the FLOSS movement can learn from feminism, and offer practical ways for FLOSS projects to be more diverse and inclusive. They suggest that the FLOSS community is being revitalised from the edges, but that real changes are needed in perspective for this energy to impact the centre of power which constrains its liberatory potential.
The edition opens with a report by Tara Tarakiyee on the FLOSS funding landscape and how this shapes participation in global FLOSS communities. Tarakiyee argues that while FLOSS is free to use, study, modify and redistribute, it is “far from free of power relations.” Instead, “decision-making power accrues to those who contribute most, and the capacity to contribute is funded by technical and monetary capital.” It is a system where “funding structures embed political and geographic priorities” that fail to challenge “colonial patterns of extraction and dependency” in big and small ways:
English-language documentation, governance norms inherited from North American tech culture, contribution practices designed around Northern work patterns and time zones, definitions of merit that privilege coding output over community facilitation or localisation work: none of these are imposed through licensing terms. They emerge from who founded and funded the projects, and they persist because funding continues to flow to projects that operate this way.
Tarakiyee’s report offers concrete recommendations to remedy the imbalances in participation – for governments in the Global South, funders, corporate users of FLOSS and FLOSS communities – although these “address symptoms rather than causes” given that “more fundamental changes remain a long way out.”
Situating his analysis in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, Ragheb Ghandour interrogates the intersection of language and power, and the corporate and state capture of the progressive political significance of “openness”; it is a word, he argues, that is “worth fighting for, precisely because the tradition it points to is worth preserving.” This “capture of the openness narrative” cannot be reversed easily, and is “driven by actors with significant resources and clear interests in blurring the distinctions that the FLOSS movement depends on.” He points out the inherent contradiction where the term has been institutionalised by governments in the SWANA region while censorship and surveillance – a lack of openness – are simultaneously central to a state’s agenda of technological control. This contradiction can only be resolved by neutering the term of its political agency and meaning:
The word “openness” appears in official strategy documents. The political substance it is supposed to carry does not. This is state capture at its most complete, not the rejection of openness language but its institutionalisation, hollowed out and made safe.
Ghandour also notes the structural exclusion of Arabic from the digital commons for reasons other than its “technical complexities”. Echoing Tarakiyee’s analysis, he observes how platforms such as GitHub are “subject to the same geopolitical power structures they are supposed to transcend” (developers from Syria, Iran and Crimea, for example, were locked out due to US trade sanctions). In a region where the “question of who controls the tools of communication is not abstract but genuinely urgent,” what he describes as the “steady drift of language” is personal:
Not because any of us had exclusive rights to it [i.e. the word “open”], but because the political tradition it pointed to was built on something real: the idea that software freedom is inseparable from the freedom of people to govern their own digital lives.
Penguin Selectah also writes from a regional perspective, but in this instance, the Balkans. He argues that the region suffers similar exclusions as countries in the Global South from the nexuses of institutional and governance power located in Western Europe and the United States. The Balkans is “close enough to the money to see it,” but its “developers watch calls for proposals designed in Brussels, Berlin or Amsterdam, with eligibility criteria, fiscal requirements and application cultures built for organisations unlike theirs.” His argument is aligned with Haitham Dahboor’s insistence in his report on using the term “Global Majority” rather than “Global South”. The region’s experience is a reminder that:
[The] periphery is not a hemisphere but a position, one that parts of Europe occupy alongside most of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and that marginalised communities occupy inside the North itself.
The question that Selectah’s report poses is how this divide can be bridged – a divide which, like others here, he argues is the result of structural imbalances in “funding, governance, language, recognition and the basic material conditions of participation.” The answer does not lie in “outreach”, but in redistribution. In the meantime, he writes, the “periphery is not waiting”:
It is building its own conferences, its own community infrastructure, its own norms, and on some measures of inclusion it is already ahead of the centre it is told to emulate.
Ada LaNerd’s report overviews key events relevant to the FLOSS community in the European Union, illustrating the distinct political orientations of these events, and the attempts by some to create more inclusive spaces. She takes a digital justice framing to her report, emphasising the need for FLOSS activists to work more proactively with civil society organisations to effectively and meaningfully “mobilise against the dynamics of technofacism.” She also outlines the difficulties of FLOSS policy advocacy in the region where:
[O]ften opaque and highly complex legislative procedures and decision-making arenas […] benefit major private sector companies who have virtually unlimited means to make sure their voice is heard.
She contrasts the politics of events such as FOSDEM, which attracts over 10,000 FLOSS enthusiasts to Brussels each year for “beer, open source [and] lightning talks”, with the more radical resistance organising of meet-ups such as Cables of Resistance with its call to “refuse, hack and shut down Big Tech” or OFFDEM – organised in response to FOSDEM – which consists of “self-organised discussions hosted in buildings occupied by migrant people.” But despite their political intentions, she argues that the success of some of these interventions is only partial – OFFDEM, for example, “still hasn’t managed to attract a diverse audience, even though it is much more diverse than FOSDEM.”
She writes that a real reinvigoration of the FLOSS movement requires “a much broader perspective on social justice,” and sees potential in an alignment with the digital justice movement. “Cooperation […] on issues such as food security and agrotech, or efforts to re-establish water as a common good […] instead of being used to cool datacentres” would offer FLOSS activists a way to “take back the means of production in alliance with all dispossessed communities and groups.”
In their report, Bruna Zanolli and Joana Varon argue that the FLOSS movement can be revitalised by drawing on the energy of the feminist movement with its much longer trajectory of struggle. They explore the parallels between intersectional feminist principles and the four freedoms of FLOSS, and in doing so modify the source code of the four freedoms from a feminist perspective. Building their report from interviews with cyberfeministas in Latin America, they offer some account as to why the FLOSS movement is not as strong as it used to be – it is described as being in “retreat” and of “declining relevance”, suffering from a “loss of political visibility, of community energy, and of institutional support.” As one interviewee (Gabriela Nardy) puts it:
There’s a whole “new generation” of internet governance activists who barely touch on this issue. I also know many people who worked with free software in the past but now use proprietary software.
For the authors, a problem is FLOSS’s origin story – it is presented as the “feat of extraordinary (and extraordinarily toxic) men who single-handedly built a movement for technopolitical freedom” – which, they argue, “crowds out other ways of understanding what the movement could be, and who it could serve.” What is needed is a “more communal understanding of autonomy, an expanded concept of source code, a politics of care as infrastructure, and a demand that formal freedoms translate into substantive access for those most marginalised.”
Rebecca Ryakitimbo offers an interesting macro-view of how FLOSS advocacy has emerged in three regions of the Global South – Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia – suggesting that this reflects the “different infrastructures, governance models and political histories” of the regions. She develops three principles of FLOSS use in the Global South which she characterises as entailing “administrative justice, territorial and bodily autonomy, and developmental agency.” She proposes these principles as a starting framework to identify where the “digital revolution is genuinely serving the people at its heart.”
Complementing Ryakitimbo’s account, Dahboor considers FLOSS advocacy and use in the Global South from a historical perspective. He illustrates early tensions between FLOSS use and corporate interests in Global Majority countries – most notably in schools (both South Africa and Egypt offer examples) – which he describes as “political struggle[s] over who controls the digital infrastructure of entire nations.” He illustrates how states have differently orientated themselves to FLOSS through short case write-ups of Jordan and South Africa. Whereas Jordan “offers one of the clearest examples in the Arab region of FLOSS being treated not as a workaround, but as a deliberate policy choice embedded in national digital strategy,” South Africa, where there is often a technical and economic framing of digital transformation, presents “a more complex, and in some ways more cautionary picture.” Referencing early developments in Brazil and Turkey, the development of health systems, Arabization, and even the roll-out of FLOSS in corporate banking, he shows both the potential of FLOSS for digital sovereignty, but also its vulnerability to political and corporate pushback. He argues that it is essential to understand these “early battles” to understand “where the Global Majority stands today: still fighting, still building alternatives, and more aware than ever that digital freedom is not a technical preference but a political demand.”
While for Dahboor, a similar political imperative to “building alternatives” is now “driving a new generation of innovators to develop AI tools in and for their own contexts,” Zara Rahman and Elisa Lindinger ask in their report by the same title: “Is it too late to build an AI commons?” They suggest that with a technology already so deeply exploitative as AI, building a real AI commons may be too difficult to achieve:
The model of existence (rather than business model) of an AI commons would need to follow vastly different rules than those found in the AI industry: federated, growing sustainably rather than growing at scale, governed through participation rather than ownership, and accounting for many very different interests, while bridging local and global, analog and digital.
It is a provocative piece, that goes as far as asking whether participating in the governance of AI may “diminish our collective ability to exercise refusal.”
The edition concludes with a report by Maja Kraljic on how FLOSS projects can be more diverse and inclusive. Drawing on a best practices guide developed by APC as part of the NGI Zero (NGI0) consortium, it unpacks what “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion” mean in a practical way, and serves as a resource for FLOSS projects to ensure sustainable community participation. Its concrete recommendations offer a useful anchoring in a world where, as Ghandour puts it, “‘open’ can mean almost anything.”
This edition also carries edited extracts from interviews with Anriette Esterhuysen, Steve Song, Carolina Botero, Esther Payne and Aymeric Mansoux. The interviews were conducted by Xavier Coadic, a consultant for the NGI0 consortium. They discuss issues such as the overwriting of the early internet in Africa, the right to repair, the “creolisation” of free software, financing FLOSS development, and why being unreasonable matters.
APC would like to thank the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), European Commission, NLNet Foundation and NGI Zero coalition for their support for this Global Information Society Watch 2026 special edition.
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