Wie offen sind „offene“ Online-Gemeinschaften? Inklusion, Exklusion und die Ambivalenz von Schließungen

After an initial focus on the supposedly boundaryless openness of the internet and of online communities in particular, exclusionary effects of “open” online platforms have increasingly received more sociological attention. Thus, even in online communities marked as explicitly open, such as in the field of open source software or in the context of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, there is a lack of diversity in terms of both contributors and contributions. Using a constitutive perspective on openness and closedness that views them not as respective endpoints of a continuum but as mutually dependent, we develop a typology of openness–closure configurations that are characteristic for “open” online communities. As a result, the focus shifts from the assumption of generalizable openness per se toward specific openness that is accompanied by, or even dependent on, specific forms of closure.