On 2 and 3 October 2026, re:publica came to Vienna for the first time. Hosted at the Kulturhaus Brotfabrik, re:publica Vienna brought together voices from science, civil society, media, politics and technology to discuss some of the central challenges facing digital societies today.
The programme addressed questions around digital power, artificial intelligence and algorithms, democratic public spheres, digital infrastructures, media and social change. With more than 150 international speakers, the event provided a new platform in Austria for exchange between research, activism, media and politics.
ZSI was represented at the event by Katja Mayer and Barbara Kieslinger, both senior scientists at the Centre for Social Innovation.
Beyond digital sovereignty: towards open and democratic digital futures
Katja Mayer participated in the panel discussion “Jenseits von Souveränität: Offene & demokratische digitale Zukünfte” (“Beyond Sovereignty: Open & Democratic Digital Futures”), together with Leonhard Dobusch and Sandra Barthel, moderated by Astrid Mager.
The discussion explored how the concept of digital sovereignty can be translated into the everyday practice of building and maintaining open digital infrastructures. The panellists addressed openness not simply as a technical characteristic, but as an ongoing social, institutional and legal practice that has to be actively organised, maintained and governed.
Among the topics discussed were open digital infrastructures at the European level, participatory media ecosystems and openness in science. The panel also examined the growing tensions surrounding open knowledge infrastructures, which enable collaboration, innovation, public accountability and democratic participation while increasingly facing commercial appropriation, including the use of openly accessible online content and knowledge resources for training artificial intelligence.
The panel also discussed the importance of federated and community-governed infrastructures. Initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud illustrate that federation is not only a technical question of interoperability. It also requires long-term institution building, shared rules, trust, maintenance, financing and collective decision-making.
These questions are central to social innovation. As European digital and research policy increasingly emphasises technological competitiveness, social innovation asks who can shape change, who benefits, and how public value can be preserved. Digital sovereignty, from this perspective, is not autarky but the capacity to govern and, where necessary, change dependencies. For science, this means retaining control over the conditions of knowledge production in ways that safeguard scientific integrity and serve the public interest.
The discussion drewon the recently published book “The Politics of Open Infrastructures”, co-authored by Katja Mayer together with Astrid Mager and Renée Ridgway, as well as on the recently published brochure ABC der Offenheit, co-authored by Katja Mayer.
ZSI’s participation in the first re:publica Vienna reflects the institute’s long-standing engagement with the social dimensions of digital transformation, open science, participation and responsible research and innovation. In a policy environment increasingly dominated by competitiveness, scale and technological acceleration, this opportunity to connect these perspectives is particularly important: innovation is not only about developing new technologies faster, but about building the institutional capacities, governance arrangements and public infrastructures that allow technological change to contribute to more open, inclusive and democratic societies.
Links: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0528
Barthel, S., Melanie, B., Fischbauer, S., Garád, C., Lutz, B., Mayer, K., Reiter, M., Schön, S., & Stark, P. (2026). ABC der Offenheit. Verlag Kulturplattform Oberösterreich. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23101526
