Consider Academia as a commons, how should we govern like a commoners?
Thank you for visiting the Commons4Academics workshop repository. We are organising a toolbox for administering an academic section as a commons and would like to present them in a workshop.
This document (the README file) is a hub to give you some information about the project. Jump straight to one of the sections below, or just scroll down to find out more.
We collaborate with experts on the theory of commons to organize a training workshop for fellow academics to enable them to organize their resources and manage them in form of a commons. We work openly because we observe the need for such training and hope to make it widely accessible.
Our cultural goal is to convince colleagues that commons is a good formation for organization and governance of academic resources. Our ambition is to organise this project as a logical series of tasks and guidelines suitable for adaptation, revision, and reproduction for follow-up events.
Sharing resources is one of the foundations of university education and development. For example, the curriculum, the literature, and the scientific method in the most general sense all form common resources that are transferred from generation to generation. These common resources are so close to us that we sometimes do not see them, and do not realise that they should be properly organised. Meanwhile, some of these resources have been subject to forces of privatisation and marketisation. It is therefore an imperative of modern academia to organise its common resources in such a way that they can stay accessible to ourselves and to future generations. Recent activities on open science could be seen as important steps to achieve this goal.
Most academics are not aware of robust structures that can be employed for organising a sustainable and flourishing commons. (Yes! Commons is singular. See the definition of commons.)
The main goal of this project is to raise awareness about the notion of the commons and its potential for developing open science, both internationally and inside our university. To reach this goal, our first step is organising a workshop together with academics and experts who have done research into commons and its governance.
The main focus of this workshop is to bring these parties together, and organise a workshop for academics who would like to learn more about organising common academic resources in the form of commons, and start a concrete pilot project based on this workshop. Examples for such projects are:
Initiators of this project are Annemarie Kalis and Sanli Faez, with the support of Utrecht Young Academy and the Open Science Community Utrecht. We are collaborating with Socrates Schoutens and the Waag Society in organising our first workshop
The Digital Library of the Commons defines "commons" as "a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest". To learn more, you can start by reading the wikipedia entry on commons.