Future of Education Charrette
Peter Scupelli is joining two dozen leading thinkers, tech visionaries, librarians and change-agents to help imagine a new universe of collaborative systems that could transform the academy. The group convenes at Indiana University’s Ostrom Workshop, founded by commons scholar and Nobel laureate Professor Elinor Ostrom, from July 22 to 24, 2017, to explore new patterns of scholarly commons that could help invigorate open science, the humanities and academic institutions more generally. The charrette is being hosted by Earth Science Information Partners and the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has provided funding for this endeavor.
It is an open secret that many structures and protocols of academic research, communication and collaboration are relics of another era, unable to take full advantage of the rich affordances of digital networks. In addition, many academic systems are overly
formal, hierarchical and credential driven. While open platforms have significantly advanced scientific and academic missions, many fields of inquiry are discovering that open access and sharing are not enough.
What’s needed is active stewardship, curation, peer commitment and “commoning” – the social practices, ethical norms and processes by which a community can govern itself and manage its research objects. To explore the possibilities, we are convening a “pattern lexicon” charrette to identify possible “design patterns” based on the efforts of several open-science organizations committed to open access to scholarly resources.
There are already encouraging developments in this direction. Just last year, the European Commission announced support for a European scholarly commons as the future of EU science (Open Innovation). At the same time,Force11 is exploring how a scholarly commons can serve as the organizational schema for better governance and management of scientific data sets, software, work-flows, and publications.