Curating Power: FOSS in the Service of National Interests
summary
Research traces governments assembling and exporting curated open stacks—India Stack, an emerging “Deutschland Stack,” DHIS2 deployed via PEPFAR—and shows curation through standardization, long‑term funding, and gatekeeping rather than pure volunteer practice. Evidence includes policy texts, UN licensing work, South Korea’s pseudonymized public data portal and a UK national data library experiment. The analysis flags surprising controls like export rules that list Python listed as EC00003 and labels the practice stack curation as a tool of digital sovereignty and geopolitical influence.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction to curating power
- 1:55What is securitization of open source
- 5:52Open source and corporate control
- 8:47Government influence on open source
- 11:35Digital sovereignty in international relations
- 13:26Flavors of digital sovereignty
- 17:45Stack curation by nation states
- 22:04Case studies and implications
- 24:09Resisting top-down curation
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