Making Sustainable Open Source Software Infrastructures by Federating and Learning in the Global Context

The idea of the “network society” has highlighted how the logic of networks has shaped the contemporary world, with a specific emphasis on the role of information technology (IT). More than a decade ago Castells (1998), engaged by the UN Research Institute for Social Development Conference on Information Technologies and Social Development, wrote: “The most critical distinction in this organizational logic is to be or not to be – in the network. Be in the network, and you can share and, over time, increase your chances. Be out of the network, or become switched off, and your chances vanish, since everything that counts is organized around a worldwide web of interacting networks.” Such networks do not emerge and sustain themselves autonomously; they are in interplay, shaping and shaped by large IT systems, here referred to as “information infrastructures”, comprising practices, institutions and organizing processes. Information infrastructures are unevenly distributed and evolving. Organizational contexts have a central role in such unevenness