[STS-Africa] Reminder: Fri, September 26 Community Call: “Equality of Access Requires Equity in Design: Rethinking Open Science Infrastructures”

[SEEKCommons Project]

Friendly reminder: On behalf of the SEEKCommons Project, which is funded
by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), we would like to invite
you to our next community call:
Friday, September 26
6:00 p.m. CET / 12:00 p.m. EST / 9:00 a.m. PST
Via Zoom


In NSF SEEKCommons, we work in a distributed network of STS researchers,
OS practitioners, and socio-environmental researchers to promote science
and technology commons for participative socio-environmental research.
Our call series offers an opportunity to discuss the possibilities of
the commons as a governance framework, with speakers presenting on its
challenges, benefits, lessons learned, and the uncharted possibilities
for “open technologies.”

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FRI 26 SEPTEMBER 2025 - 6:00 PM (CET) / 12:00 PM (EST) / 9:00 AM (PST)
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This month’s Community Call topic:
“Equality of Access Requires Equity in Design: Rethinking Open Science
Infrastructures” with Louise Bezuidenhout
The 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science underscored the global
commitment to Open Science. The declaration defines Open Science through
the values of inclusivity and equity and the principle of
sustainability. This commitment to equity hinges on a key implicit
assumption: that diverse stakeholders around the world will be able to
add value to their lives by accessing and applying the resources made
available through Open Science infrastructures and practices. Despite
these strong commitments, engagement around what equitable access to
open resources looks like in practice is low. Being able to meaningfully
utilize available online resources is influenced by a range of other
technical, infrastructural, cultural and geopolitical factors.


This call presents research on infrastructural equity. Using
computational methods, access to open infrastructures has been tested
from different locations around the world. The data illustrates a highly
heterogeneous landscape of accessibility of open resources that links to
the design decisions inherent in these infrastructures and the contexts
in which they are trying to be used. How can we ensure that
infrastructures are not geo-blocked to specific countries? How can we
support use of infrastructures in low-bandwidth settings? How can we
enable engagement with infrastructures through diverse ICT devices? How
can we ensure that equal access to open resources is supported by equity
in infrastructure design?



The series is open to public participation, and registration is
required: https://bit.ly/4gaQgyG


Complete details can be found in our September 26 Community Call Flyer:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1--yukjZBCNwgA2AWRUcJCBKKJdobEixJ/view?usp=sharing


For more info about the series, visit:
https://seekcommons.org/community-calls.html
We hope you can join us!

Warm regards,
The NSF SEEKCommons Project