Paper short abstract

Governments increasingly rely on GitHub for digital governance, yet embed sovereignty within a foreign platform. This is a paradox where openness, dependency, and boundary-making are constantly renegotiated within a US-based private infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary governments are increasingly relying on commercial infrastructures like GitHub, a US-based company who host a variety of opensource, public code as repositories in their pursuit of digital governance. Yet, while some initiatives by the platform have sought to enable national sovereignty in new ways e.g. GitHub's EU residency as of 2022, governments also increasingly have to comply with a platform logic that is grounded in the US political system. This paper investigates how governments perform digital governance through an exploration of GitHub's own list of government users, mapping of repositories, participation and deletion. GitHub is treated not merely as a technical repository but as platform, governance mechanism and archive. On one hand, GitHub's infrastructural affordances support both digital governance and citizen participation by making visible code, projects, accountability, and versioning. On the other hand, governments' use of GitHub, as well as GitHub's strategic and differing collaborations with governments, enact a form of boundary-making that shifts the ruling domain towards the glocal standards of the private platform. Infrastructures like GitHub are, of course, not neutral but mediate power through technical architectures (DeNardis & Musiani, 2016). By tracing governments' presence to GitHub and their participation within its infrastructural affordances, this paper argues that contemporary forms of digital governance are enacted through technical dependency that relies on GitHub playing multiple roles.