Governing the Knowledge Commons: Why Open Library Infrastructure Matters

Résumé fourni par la source

This keynote at the World Open Library Foundation Conference (WOLFCon) 2026 in Prague, entitled Governing the Knowledge Commons: Why Open Library Infrastructure Matters, examines how libraries and their partners can retain meaningful agency over the digital systems on which access to knowledge increasingly depends. Its central argument is that dependency itself is not the problem; ungovernable dependency is. The keynote defines the Knowledge Commons not simply as a collection of openly available information, but as an ecosystem of knowledge resources, communities, rules, institutions, standards, and infrastructures that must be collectively maintained. It identifies three major risks—enclosure, extraction, and capture—which artificial intelligence intensifies by changing not only who may access knowledge, but also who may compute over it and under whose rules. In response, the keynote connects enclosure with openness, extraction with reciprocity, and capture with digital sovereignty. Sovereignty is understood not as technological independence, but as the collective capacity to shape infrastructure, contest decisions, move data, replace components, and exit critical dependencies. Reciprocal licensing models are considered alongside their limitations, emphasizing the need for collective or statutory mechanisms that ensure value created from the commons contributes to its sustainability. The keynote advocates polycentric governance, in which responsibility is distributed among libraries, scholarly communities, developers, service providers, civil society, funders, and public institutions. Libraries should serve as anchors rather than owners of this ecosystem. Against the background of emerging European policies on open source, maintenance, digital commons, cloud infrastructure, and AI, the keynote calls for libraries to be recognized as critical infrastructure. It concludes with practical recommendations: audit dependencies, use procurement as a governance instrument, fund maintenance and stewardship, build shared capacity—potentially through a Library Open Source Programme Office—and, above all, govern what you depend on.

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