







In policy circles I keep hearing about "horizontal" and "vertical" interoperability, notions that I haven't encountered in tech standards. I sat down to write about why it's a limiting understanding of interoperability and how we can do better. berjon.com/interoperability/
The Direction of Interoperability
berjon.comMay 6, 2026 at 1:53 PM
The Direction of Interoperability
Talking in terms of horizontal or vertical interoperability is too constrictive a mental model to understand what interoperability does. Doing better matters, and it's right within reach.

Adversarial Interoperability
“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish

Interoperable Serendipity
If you had asked my thoughts on interoperability some years ago, I wouldn't have had much to say. Nowadays, it has become one of my most revered ideals. And today, I want to take you along for a journey towards its summum: Interoperable Serendipity.

open-telemetry/semantic-conventions
Defines standards for generating consistent, accessible telemetry across a variety of domains
Radical Interoperability is a Political Agenda
Model the world you want to live in.

Reflections on Declarative Configuration
Advantages and pitfalls of Infrastructure as Code, and the distinction between IaC and Declarative Configuration.

Web Components Interoperability | Unpacked
Web Components Interoperability — explained clearly with diagrams.
Eventual Interoperability – Pieter Colpaert
A pragmatic approach to interoperability: model your data richly for your own needs, then allow the eventual creation of one‑to‑many alignments.

Human-computer intra-action: a relational approach to digital media and technologies
The growing pervasiveness of digital technologies has exposed the entanglements of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with its surrounding context, from the immediate vicinity of interfaces to global issues. While often providing solutions to societal issues, interactive technologies also many times contribute to them. They impact and are impacted by the world, in a process of continuous mutual influence and co-constitution that raises important implications not only to user experience, effectiveness and efficiency, but also to ethics, social responsibility and environmental health. In this article, I draw on the new materialism notion of intra-action to propose a conceptual shift to a relational approach for HCI, which I refer to as Human-Computer Intra-Action (HCIA), capable of capturing from the outset the inherent relationships with the world that inform the design of interactive technology. To that end, I propose the notion of relationalities to reflect the synergies and antagonisms around those relationships, and discuss emerging notions of spatiality and temporality by considering the increasing hybridity of socio-technical engagements both in space (local versus remote) and in time (immediate versus stretched). Based on that, I propose a preliminary method for mapping intra-actions associated to interactive technologies, envisaged as a starting point to a relational take on their design process.

Data Mesh Architecture: Interoperability, Co-Operation, and Co-Regulation
This paper examines the emergence of data mesh architectures and data intermediaries as key components in emerging data economies. It explores how data mesh arc
Toward a Critical Technical Practice
This is a chapter in Geof Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star, and Bill Turner, eds, Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, Erlbaum, 1997.
Toward a Critical Technical Practice
This is a chapter in Geof Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star, and Bill Turner, eds, Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work, Erlbaum, 1997.
Designing a multi-sided data platform: findings from the International Data Spaces case
The paper presents the findings from a 3-year single-case study conducted in connection with the International Data Spaces (IDS) initiative. The IDS represents a multi-sided platform (MSP) for secure and trusted data exchange, which is governed by an institutionalized alliance of different stakeholder organizations. The paper delivers insights gained during the early stages of the platform’s lifecycle (i.e. the platform design process). More specifically, it provides answers to three research questions, namely how alliance-driven MSPs come into existence and evolve, how different stakeholder groups use certain governance mechanisms during the platform design process, and how this process is influenced by regulatory instruments. By contrasting the case of an alliance-driven MSP with the more common approach of the keystone-driven MSP, the results of the case study suggest that different evolutionary paths can be pursued during the early stages of an MSP’s lifecycle. Furthermore, the IDS initiative considers trust and data sovereignty more relevant regulatory instruments compared to pricing, for example. Finally, the study advances the body of scientific knowledge with regard to data being a boundary resource on MSPs.

A while ago, I came up with the term Interoperable Serendipity. I was thinking of Solid at the time, but it totally applies to ATProto as well, and I'd love to see it embraced there! I just opened a discussion in the community forum to talk about it: discourse.atmosphere.community/t/interoperable-serendipity/1…
Interoperable Serendipity
discourse.atmosphere.community"Teams working across organizational boundaries, sharing structured data, and building on each other’s work with ease." I know it's called "adversarial interop", but it actually feels like "community interop", at least right now
Toni Schneider
Conference Takeaways I’m back from ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, and I'm processing what I saw and heard. The atproto developer community could not have been nicer and more welcoming. Here are some takeaways. ... toni.org/2026/04/03/conference-takeawa…