Technological design is political. In a digitally networked environment, technical decisions about the infrastructure of information and communications technologies (ICT) can have a broad impact on public policy, innovation, and economic growth. The decisions governing these developing systems are increasingly being promulgated in the form of standards. Technical standards are usually not established by legislatures or elected representatives, but increasingly play the mediating role of those institutions in resolving social tensions, such as access to information versus property rights and law enforcement versus individual civil liberties. Standards, once entrenched, can endure longer than other policy mechanisms because of user investments, product development investments, institutional commitments, and preservation of industry hegemony among powerful stakeholders. Economically, the intellectual property arrangements underlying standards determine the competitive openness of certain technology markets and intersect directly with global trade issues. On a technical level, recent interoperability problems in government services such as disaster response have prompted renewed political interest in open standards. In response, governments have established or renewed technical strategies based on open standards. Despite the significance of open standards in the global ICT context, even the meaning of openness is a contentious topic. This conference, the first to address global open standards issues from an academic perspective, has three objectives: • Shed light on the controversial and value-laden concepts of openness, interoperability, democratic participation, and competitiveness in the context of standards. • Afford an opportunity for political and economic stakeholders to find common ground on open standards. • Begin to craft a theoretical framework exploring the concepts of open standards in the larger context of technology, markets, politics, and law.