Social media platforms have brought challenges that need to be addressed when evaluating the potential for openness and participation in cultural knowledge production. They do not seem to stand up to their promise of providing participatory culture in open and fair forms (Kidd 2018; van Dijck and Nieborg 2009; Fuchs 2015). Although the Internet was first established in the vision of a truly democratic medium (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 1999), the growing commercialisation of the web by large technological companies has intensified inequalities and amplified the gap for meaningful participation (Fuchs 2015, 2021; Zuboff 2015, 2019; Srnicek 2017; Lund and Zukerfeld 2020), where cultural heritage institutions have increasingly become co-dependent on their infrastructure and logic for audience engagement and participation. In this seminar, drawing mainly on the work I made during my doctoral study, we will discuss two knowledge stewardship frameworks to facilitate in fostering participation in open cultural knowledge production, by empowering users to make (good) (re-)use of the data, as well as aiding in treating data beyond the current data commodification model that has prevailed in the current digital economy towards collective ways. The seminar encourages moving away from obfuscate practices and digital “gatekeepers”, where cultural heritage institutions can re-negotiate their relationship with communities in the digital era by promoting openness, fairness and participation.