What Does It Take to Be Open? Sustaining Openness Through Closure in Open Organizing Initiatives

A growing number of organizations pledge to ideals of openness in their organizing processes. However, such attempts to increase openness through greater inclusion and transparency often fail in practice. Using the constitutive view of openness, we seek to unravel how the interaction between modes of openness and closure shapes open organizing as it unfolds over time. Analyzing an award-winning open organizing initiative, we show how four types of legitimate closures are used to increase and sustain openness across time. Against these observations, we propose a process model of punctuated openness, in which open organizing is characterized by a combination of both open and closed modes that generate and sustain desired levels of inclusion and transparency over time