Speaker
Description
If you can’t open it, you don’t own it. This principle extends beyond hardware, software or data transparency. It strikes at the heart of planetary sovereignty and justice. Infrastructures—satellites, instruments, data platforms, and computational models—are the invisible physical architectures through which the planet is sensed, imagined, governed and shaped. Today, these systems remain largely controlled by state, military, and corporate actors. Yet what they observe and model affects everyone, humans and non-humans.
Opening planetary infrastructures is a democratic imperative. It means challenging the prevailing opacity of Earth observation systems and reclaiming environmental data as a public good. It calls for public computation—where technologies are designed not just for efficiency or profit, but for care, participation, and accountability. Initiatives like Libre Space Foundation, Open Weather or Solar Protocol exemplify how open-source, citizen or critical makers led efforts can produce alternative infrastructures rooted in local relevance, autonomy, and distributed stewardship.
To open planetary infrastructures is to redistribute power across the stack, from orbital architectures to interface layers. It means inviting plural imaginaries into the circuits of sensing, data modelling, and acting. In doing so, More-than-Planet provides for a truly public planetary condition, one that is not simply observed from above but composed, through collaboration, dissent, and collective care, from below.
