A vision for regenerative research knowledge commons
A vision for regenerative research knowledge commons
Originally published on Simon Grant's wiki.
Originally published 2024-04-28 → 30 on Simon Grant’s wiki
I wrote about the challenge of connecting regenerative research on 2024-04-19, and I'd now like to follow up on that challenge by setting out in more detail a vision for how this might actually work, focused around the knowledge commons structure, as a wiki. My major interest here is to start the creation of a knowledge commons around regenerative research in such a way that its workings are themselves regenerative, and in particular regenerative of a more collective approach to knowledge and research questions, which I wholly expect to be both stronger and deeper than an individualistic approach.
I envisage four substantial threads in this vision for the knowledge commons itself:
publications, not just academic papers but any publication in any medium, including video
the authors, individuals and organisations, of these, together with individual and collective actors / agents who can participate in this knowledge commons
a tree of terms, topics, tags, categories that evolves over time
engaging live questions, starting with individuals and emerging as collective research issues.
First I'll address the nature and structure of these four threads and the relationships between them, then go on to the associated processes and practices, including considerations of governance.
As an aside, I also love the idea of a “wisdom commons”, and I would guess that efforts to create that kind of thing will benefit from good quality knowledge commons as a foundation.
1. Publications
A major inspiration for this work is the wiki of the P2P Foundation, with which I have been involved for several years. Michel includes pages on a very large number of items relevant to all kinds of commons and peer-to-peer thinking: papers, books, articles, blog posts, videos, etc. I'm calling all of these “publications”. He often gives a link to the source, some description, some quotations, and one or more reviews, or what he calls “discussion”. This is an excellent start as a resource, vitally complementary to Wikipedia (which is well known for its policies on notability and “Wikipedia:No original research”), to investigate works in his areas of interest, and I'd like to credit that and build on it.
Each “publication” will have its own page, as in the P2P wiki, but with more structure, which I've drafted in the relevant template. Key developments include, first, a section called “Commentary” (in place of “discussion”); and then a section on emergent questions. Both these sections will be filled in and managed by researchers who are participating in the system: I'll call them “participants”. The Commentary section will be where individual named participants express their views, responses, agreement, critique, and questions around the publication. The emergent questions will be those that, after conversation, more than one person sees as engaging live interest.
Beyond existing publications, the vision here is for this collective regenerative research process to take the emergent questions (see below) and lead on to more useful and valued publications (of any kind, remember I don't just mean peer-reviewed academic publications).
2. The authors and contributors
To represent authorship, we need to represent people; and if we are representing people on a wiki, they are best shown in an even-handed way, whether they are on the one hand authors, or on the other hand, the participants who collectively build and maintain this knowledge commons through their commentary, even if they are not actually authors. Naturally, individuals may be both authors and commentators. Additionally, many items of interest don't have individual authorship, but belong collectively to some organisation, so we need also to represent organisations. While we are doing that, it would be helpful to represent individual affiliation to groups and organisations. And if research teams, groups, or collectives have any stable existence beyond one-time collaboration, it would make sense to represent these as well — and that gives us a lead into the emphasis on collectivity.
Considered all together, we could call these people “agents” as well as authors, actors, etc. I've drafted a template for them as well, to set out what information would be helpful to represent about any of these agents. Links to their publications, and affiliations are probably relevant to all agents. If the agent is also a participant, we will all be able to see, not only what groups they belong to, but also what their areas of interest are, and vitally, what live questions they own as theirs.
3. The tree of terms, topics, tags, or whatever
It is often helpful to be able to track through various related items on a particular topic. In MediaWiki (including Wikipedia) this function is served (in principle) by categories.1 My considerations are explained further in the structure of my wiki, and my suggested requirement for no categories. But even if MediaWiki categories are less than ideal, the desire and motive for something like this is undoubted.
So, I have drafted a template for terms. As well as an explanation of the term, clarifying any ambiguity, we would benefit from seeing any broader, narrower, or significantly related terms; and as with the other main threads, a commentary section to embody the collective variety of perspective, and an emergent questions section. The point of these last two is to ensure that the tree of terms is a living, evolving structure. The commentary allows all participants to raise their own terminological or ontological points (similar to talk pages in Wikipedia and other MediaWiki sites); and the questions section serves to express any questions that are endorsed, and may need attention.
One piece of work that could well feed in to this topic tree for the regenerative world is the table I made with the collaboration of Audrey for the Gathering of Tribes 2024. So far this is only a flat list of 15 topics, but it could well be refined. I've included the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which have 17 categories and, as you can see, only partially align. In effect, what we are looking for here is a shared, “commoned” ontology of the regenerative world, which will never be complete, but continues to grow out into the common space.2
The Wikipedia category tree is just too vast and comprehensive, and that scale would take a lot of work from many people. My hope is that our tree will live and have effective commons governance on the scale of the regenerative research world, so that it keeps up with the general consensus of what is important for us.
I've put links to a few more aligned and detailed categorisations at the bottom of that table. It may be obvious that maintaining an agreed useful topic or category tree will be a major task, on which our participants will need to collaborate. However, if we can maintain what is effectively a common ontology, it will greatly aid communication around potential and actual initiatives for change.
4. Live, engaging questions
I wrote about the importance of questions on 2024-02-18 as part of a piece on intentional coming together. The main point is that it is too easy to start disagreeing about terms and definitions, as different people naturally have different perspectives. In contrast, many authorities have noted that well-crafted questions seem to open people up to dialogue, though the exploration of those questions. Something similar happens often in study groups, where the object of study naturally raises significant questions for the participants — and that can easily lead to meaningful dialogue where the people get to know each other more than superficially.
It is important, though, to ensure that key questions are indeed well crafted: specifically, that they are not closed (yes/no) questions, and that they are not based on controversial assumptions.3 For this reason, the strategy to enable this vision is first for individuals or teams to formulate emergent questions in their own words. When two or more participants can agree on a formulation, it can be moved, still in unlinked form, to the section on “Emergent questions”. At that point, there needs to be a collective process of looking at these emergent questions and crafting them into questions that are most likely to bring people together in co-creative dialogue. I'm guessing that this question-refinement process will probably be done by a research group or team that has a particular interest in it. That team will then take responsibility for creating a question in the questions branch, and putting their collective name to it as the people who will collectively steward the question into life, perhaps through a presentation, a paper, or whatever open approach they choose.
The whole process is designed around these practices of personal commentary and questioning; intersubjective validation of questions, and collective focusing on the questions that are most present, engaging, and significant to a group of the researchers. See the relevant draft question template for what is envisaged for that team to curate and steward.
The aim here is to set up a system where the questions act
to stimulate more questions, through commentary, regenerating the question space
when taken up and owned collectively, to seed more research, and publication of outcomes.
5. Why get involved, and how?
All academic researchers rely on finding previous research relevant to what they are trying to investigate, so that they can refer to and build on existing research, and to be clear whether a field is actually new or has existing work. While this is relatively easy in some established fields, it is much harder in fields that are new. In addition, if a field is not yet well-established, much of the relevant material for research will not be reported in academic journals, so it may again be harder for academics to find. Even for those researching or enquiring outside academia, this whole field is so diverse that the only obvious ways of finding other people or information are either through personal contact or through search engines — which may naturally have their own biases.
The other issue in any new field is the quality and reliability of information. Reputable academic journals always have a peer-review process, which usually acts as a quality control. There are no organised quality controls on material in personal web sites, blogs, tweets, videos, and material on mainstream social media.
Both of these issues of findability and quality would greatly benefit from collective effort. The invitation here is to form and contribute to a wide community of interest around regenerative research, or better still, a more focused community of practice around specific areas.4 Beyond keeping one's own notes, to keep notes collaboratively has several advantages. We can all benefit from the connections that each other make, to help us find material that would take longer to find on our own. And with the Commentary structure outlined above, we can share our views on the quality of the resources we find. When I mention quality, I'm not thinking of an overall summative measurement, but rather an appreciation of what is more or less valuable and relevant in any publication.
Take the issue of video and audio resources. There are endless hours of videos and podcasts, and unless they have a really good quality transcript attached, they take a lot of time to watch or listen through, to find out how useful or relevant they may be to any specific research enquiry. How valuable it would be, then, if others from my peer group who had watched or listened would give their opinions about where the valuable parts are, if any. This naturally already happens to a small extent, with people recommending videos or podcasts to other individuals they know. Some of this is done within services such as LinkedIn, where we are directed to posts etc. that people we know have rated or recommended. But what we are looking for here is to get beyond the profit-driven approach of current social media platforms, whose main driver is to keep us watching so we see the adverts they put out, and instead activate and enliven a commons-based peer process. If you like, you could see this whole vision as a way of embodying commons-based peer production for knowledge.
Differences from current projects
Looking at the examples in that commons-based peer production article, many of them are the huge and popular ones we know about, and these have fundamental differences to our present concern here. Note also the revision history of that article itself: it has not been edited very much for several years. That suggests a critique of the community of interest around the topic itself: if there is no long-term commitment to a knowledge commons, it can simply deteriorate as contributors lose interest and drift away.
From that list of examples, at first sight there was one that looked promising to me: GROWL, billed as an “education network producing open materials and curricula”. It looked like its website was active during its period of funding, but after that (2015) simply sat there unmaintained. The site points onwards towards an academic association, Research & Degrowth, which is at least alive and well. But, do they have an open knowledge commons wiki? Do they have free and open learning resources? Well, there is a little, under their “Publications & Media” tab. But it clearly doesn't go far towards an open research knowledge commons. In common with many other such organisations, they sell courses. That's a less open approach than publishing all materials as open educational resources.
There seems to be no successful model on which to base a project like this very one:5 an initiative that is based around collective pooling of commentary on publications; on collaborating on crafting the most potent and creative research questions into matters that really matter; an initiative that is regenerative of collectivity within the regenerative research community, of collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work on issues of regeneration; and which ultimately contributes to global regeneration.
6. Governance and transitions
As a less exciting and more pragmatic detour into some of the practicalities, I'd like now to look at the question of governance mainly from the perspective of the processes of transitions in the life-cycle of the key threads detailed above. It is typically at transition points that decisions need to be made, and the decisions should not be arbitrary.
My guess is that much of this structure will not be needed in practice, as it is intended to be compatible with common sense. However I will draft it out anyway, as a model for what could be there, in case it is needed in unforeseen circumstances. We could also see these just as guidelines: scaffolding to support co-creation. And it's important to me that people see this as an initiative with its feet on the ground, having thought about practical matters, and not just dreaming.
So here are some suggestions about how these processes and practices can be governed.
6.1 General considerations for pages of the knowledge commons
Obvious errors on any page may be corrected by any participant in the commons. However the curation of page content other than commentary, and emergent questions should normally only be done by members of the particular research group named on the page — who have undertaken to curate the page.
Commentary sections
Participants may add and edit their own signed commentary on any page that has a commentary section. “Signing” here (similarly to Wikipedia) means adding a link to one's own agent page.
Emergent questions
Any participant may agree with any other participant to add an agreed emergent question to the appropriate section or any page, which should be signed with both names.
6.2 People and their pages
Anyone can be referenced by any participant as an author.
Participants decide about whether to list that author as an agent. Non-participant authors continue to have no edit rights, irrespective of whether they have a page or not.
A person applies to be a participant and is accepted after some formal acceptance process. (To be decided!) This could be, for example recommendation of two existing participants followed by opportunity for others to object; of appointment of two existing participants to hold a conversation with the applicant; or acceptance by a participant research group.
A participant must have their own agent page, which the participant is responsible for curating. Other participants may add their commentary and emergent questions as on any other page.
A participant is included in any study or research group through unanimous acceptance by other members, which can be withdrawn.
There needs to be some formal process for ceasing to be allowed to participate.
6.3 Groups and their pages
Any group of participants can constitute themselves as a study group at will, and include any non-participants.
There should be a limit to the numbers of people allowed to be in a group, derived from common past and present experience.
A group where all the members are participants may apply to be recognised as an established research group, which must have its own agent page, and will have more rights than an informal study group (but I'm not yet clear which rights, and I'm not sure how to govern this.) The point about a research group here is that they actually use, as well as curating, their part of the knowledge commons, so they have a natural incentive to maintain it.
If we wish to allow an entry route to general participation through research group membership, the membership procedures of the group need to be vouched for by two other established groups.6
6.4 Publication pages
Anyone can make an external link to a publication from their owned commentary.
To create a publication page as part of the knowledge commons, a research group needs to agree on its relevance and significance, and then take ongoing responsibility for the curation of the page. It's not clear to me whether informal study groups should be creating publication pages.
Though all participants are encouraged to add commentary and emergent questions, the curating research group will still have a responsibility to monitor those processes, and bring up issues arising for wider consideration.
6.5 Questions and their pages
A working research group, through one of its members, may set up a research question, taking into account emergent questions from any pages. This is signed by the group, who take responsibility for curating its main content.
As noted above, any participant may contribute comments and questions, and this may help the working group to figure out how best to address the question in active (or action) research.
Which way is best for the links?
2024-05-02 Here is an afterthought, relevant to most wikis. As backlinks are generated automatically, there is a choice in a wiki of which way to put in the links. You could put them in both ways, but that might add more backlinks than necessary. A factor to consider is: who is more responsible for the link? Theirs is the page it should be on. Suggestions…
Terms are linked to, but not from, so you can see all the other pages that refer to that term in the term's backlinks.
Publications actively link to authors and terms, and to the questions they raise.
Research groups actively link to their members, not vice versa.
Participant agents link to terms for their areas of interest, and the formulated questions they are most engaged with.
Participant authors may also, exceptionally, want to link to their publications.
Research questions actively link only to the research groups engaged with them.
The above is for guidance, not compulsion, and it will be up to the curating research group to manage the links from and to the pages they are taking responsibility for.
Conclusion
I hope this gives a flavour of
the regenerative nature of the practices
the stimuli and incentives to act collectively (and thus to tap into collective intelligence)
the creative role of well-crafted questions as central to regenerative research life.
I warmly invite conversation with anyone who would like to help put this all together and make it happen.
See also my writings on ontological commoning.
Compare also what Parker Palmer calls “open, honest questions”.
A key author in the field of communities of practice is Étienne Wenger. I was dismayed to find there is little or no literature citing both Wenger and Elinor Ostrom.
I'll keep looking, and do tell me of possible ones … if this were a knowledge commons, these would of course go in the Commentary section :)
This procedure is in the spirit of a set devised many years ago by Denis Postle for the Independent Practitioners Network.