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2025-11-06 10:26:16 -05:00 · 2025-09-29 06:04:08 -04:00 · 2025-09-29 06:03:13 -04:00 · 2025-09-29 05:59:56 -04:00 · 2025-09-29 05:55:53 -04:00 · 2025-09-29 05:51:43 -04:00
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+<!doctype html>
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+		<title>Leading Generously</title>
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+# Leading Generously
+---
+### Tools for Transformation
+---
+<br />
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
+<small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/bath250625.html</small>
+
+
+<img width="400" src="images/lgcover.jpg" alt="Cover of Leading Generously">
+
+Note: Thank you so much for that introduction, and HUGE thanks to Marilyn and Cindi for dreaming up this conversation about *Leading Generously*. The origins of this book are seeded both in some questions surfaced by my prior book, *Generous Thinking*, as well as in some of what we as a campus have been through in recent years. I'm not going to re-tell that story here today -- many of you lived it along with me, and if you want to revisit those events I tell at least part of the story in the book's first chapter. I'll just boil it all down to say that in my first seven years as a faculty member here at MSU, we had six presidents and four provosts, and everyone on campus spent a lot of time wrestling with a resulting mixture of anger and despair and exhaustion that seriously inhibited our ability to focus on the things that are most important to us.
+
+
+# crisis
+
+Note: Calling what we've all been through in recent years -- not to mention what's happening all around us right now -- a "crisis" feels so obvious as to say absolutely nothing. We are surrounded by crisis in the academy (not to mention the world beyond) and while our circumstances at MSU have perhaps been more intense than at other institutions, to say that we have been facing an "institutional crisis" feels redundant. And yet we talk about crisis all the time, especially in the humanities, where we have been in crisis for decades. So part of my goal in *Leading Generously* is to argue that we have at hand some of the means of responding to the crises faced by our fields and our institutions, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large.
+
+
+<img width="400" src="images/gtcover.png" alt="Cover of Generous Thinking">
+
+Note: This grows in large part out of my previous book, *Generous Thinking*, in which I argued that one way out of this sense of crisis was rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university, its internal communities, and the publics that we serve, all of which would require re-grounding the institution by building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. This kind of change requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is social rather than individual, and renewing that sense of higher education as a public good encourages us to think about the public modes for our work, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, that might help us better demonstrate the good that we do, especially in hard times. 
+
+
+# change
+
+Note: But embracing these ways of working requires deep *institutional* change, in order to ensure that work is valued and supported. And it requires not only transforming the ways that we value and reward public work, but also creating the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and adopting the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life. And this is just one piece of the overarching change that our institutions need.
+
+
+# how
+
+Note: By the time *Generous Thinking* came out, it had already become clear to me that I had some follow-up work to do, that I needed to dig far deeper into the process of and the conditions for transformation. And then after a talk I gave at Virginia Tech in October 2019, an attendee asked a question that's been stuck in the back of my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that's relatively easy to embrace when we're flush, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to be generous when we're facing significant budget cuts, for instance, or is it inevitable that we fall back into analytics-driven competition with every unit -- much less every worker -- out to protect their own resources and their own privileges?
+
+I don't remember exactly how I answered then. I suspect that it was some combination of "you're completely right; that's the real question" and "the difficulties involved in being generous in hard times are precisely why we need to practice generosity in a determined way in good times." And I may have said some things about the importance of transparency in priority-setting and decision-making, and of involving the collective in that process.
+
+But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us — those of us who work for them, as well as those of us who rely on them — invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I want the institution to survive, and I want to maintain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed. 
+
+
+![Protester in mask](images/protest.jpg)
+<smaller>https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
+
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence in recent years of the painful inequities on our campuses, and have had proven to us that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to respond to civil protest with an increasingly militarized police presence. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution is far more important than the people for whom it exists. And all of them have led me to ask what would be required for us to remake the university as an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and ensure that all of its relationships remain forever contingent?
+
+
+# collective action
+
+Note: One key thing that transforming the university would require is collective action. Because no single leader can change things in a system this broken. We might make some headway together, but first we have to build that together and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals. Because right now, the primary way that the idea of "together" gets invoked -- as in "we're all in it together" -- is not in the context of resource or power-sharing but of sacrifice. And sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+# leadership
+
+Note: Building those structures -- those ways of being and ways of working together -- is a key component of what I describe as leadership in the book. And new forms of values-enacted leadership are required for us collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. In talking about "values-enacted leadership," I want to note that I'm far less interested in radicalizing individual leaders who can rise through the administrative ranks than I am in building cohorts of leaders who can work together to transform those ranks. 
+
+
+>  “the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working.” (Interview with Dianne Harris)
+
+Note: This is true not least because, as Dianne Harris (dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington) told me, "the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working." That heroic model of individual leadership is damaging not just to the institution, whose welfare lies at the mercy of such an executive's successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the well-being of that executive, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable and who will inevitably fail at pulling that off. We need instead a new framework for academic leadership that is collective and collaborative rather than individual, enabling leadership to become a mode of connection that can be centered anywhere within the org chart where people have ideas about how to make things better. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to make them not only more generous but more resilient.
+
+
+# agency
+
+Note: In addition to the notion that leadership must of necessity be an individual quality, there's a second bit of conventional wisdom that *Leading Generously* is working against: the relative powerlessness of individuals in their encounters with the structures and systems of contemporary life. This sense of powerlessness derives both from some highly problematic sources — those who benefit from existing structures and systems and would prefer everyone else just let them do their thing — and from some misunderstandings of critical theories of power in contemporary culture. Those theories describe the issues they explore as _systemic_ rather than _individual_, arguing that real change must be structural, building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, reshaping economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. All of that demands something much larger and harder than personal transformation — but we misunderstand the import of those theories if we assume they mean that individual action doesn't matter. The individual matters, deeply: just perhaps not the way we think.
+
+When I argue that the complicated process of culture change can begin anywhere in the org chart, that any person (and not just the uniquely heroic leader) can be a change agent, I don't mean to suggest that the problems we face originate with individual behavior, or that any given person's change of heart can change the world. But if our goals include building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world, individuals have to find ways to become empowered, because the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+It's a matter of where we locate agency, of who has the ability to make significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, or as the unique privilege of those with rank and status within those structures and systems, there is little agency left to the rest of us. And it's certainly true that the problems we face are enormous, and that one person without structural authority can't do much to change the world — but groups of people can. Groups of people working together can form coalitions and mobilize them to develop new organizational structures with collectivity at their center. Building those coalitions begins with the energy of individuals who decide to put their agency to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+# collective
+
+Note:  We need a new *collective* model for academic leadership not least because the crises in which our institutions are mired indicate that the model under which we currently labor is irreparably broken. I want to be clear in what I'm saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they can in many of our campus leadership roles. It's not the people that need replacing, or at least not *all* of the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a form of institutional deck-chair-rearranging. The problem lies rather with the structures within and through which they work. That's the model of academic leadership we need to contend with, a model with its boards and its presidents and its innumerable vice-presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of non-profit entities in general, as can be seen in the extensive recent literature on reimagining non-profit leadership. And those structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.
+
+
+# “like a business”
+
+Note: This is why our campus values statements die a little every time that someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all of our institutions already *are* being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren't producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our front-line labor in check, and so on. All of which we've been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we're in. 
+
+
+# competitive
+
+Note: Even worse, however, the unspoken parts of "like a business," the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures, are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro-level, where each individual student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro-level, where our institutions are required to square off in the marketplace rather than develop any kinds of cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector rather than creating the rankings-driven lists of winners and losers that surround us today.
+
+So here's the core of my argument: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and shouldn't be run that way. They are rather shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have -- in this case, knowledge -- support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.  And in that context of collaboration and mutual support, we can start to see that the term "leadership" as it most often gets used a misleading euphemism.
+
+
+# management
+
+Note: In fact, most of what comes down to us from above is management rather than leadership. Don't get me wrong; good management is crucial to any organization. Management, as John Kotter has argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on organizing and directing the people and resources necessary to conduct an organization's work. Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of "coping with change." This is a distinction with a difference for Kotter, who has argued that most organizations today are 
+
+
+## “over-managed <br />and under-led”
+
+Note: "over-managed and under-led," and universities are no exception. At every level of our institutions, we have been disciplined into an inability to cope with -- much less create -- change. Transforming our ideas about campus leadership could allow us to people together to create change, to model and to create the conditions for more thoughtful, more inclusive, more just ways of working. Leadership, in other words, ought to be about building the relationships necessary for collective action. It should be connective, and compassionate, and generative. And it could emerge anywhere in an institution, if cultivated.
+
+
+# cultivation
+
+Note: I choose the metaphor of cultivation pointedly, thanks to Beronda Montgomery, whose brilliant book _Learning from Plants_ explores the ways that an understanding of botanical life can help us develop more  supportive, more collectively attuned ways of working in human communities. As Montgomery argues, learning from plants encourages us to focus on remediating the environments within which we work together rather than attributing the difficulties some individuals experience in taking root and growing in those environments to internal deficits. This approach also calls upon us to develop a new kind of leadership "vision," one that can
+
+
+> <smaller>“adapt to changing circumstances, and … enable leaders to see the potential collaborations and benefits in diverse communities. This approach contrasts with the traditional <span style="color:red">gatekeeping</span> approach, in which leaders determine who gains access via conceptualizations and assumptions about who can function and thrive in a particular context. Instead, this distinct form of leadership is sense driven and environmentally adaptive; it attends to individuals while at the same time tending the ecosystems in which these individuals exist. I call this form of leadership <span style="color:red"> groundskeeping</span>, in recognition of what we know about the conditions that plants need to successfully thrive.” (Montgomery 149)</smaller> 
+
+Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** Organic metaphors such as groundskeeping and cultivation allow us to think about leadership as something that is grown rather than owned or inhabited, requiring an awareness that our institutions and organization are more akin to ecosystems than they are to the org charts we draw to represent them. Leaders must work in concert with their ecosystems, rather than operating from the top-down management perspective to which we have become accustomed.
+
+
+# organize
+
+Note: So, reorganizing our institutions around a more organic, collective, collaborative notion of leadership might lay the groundwork for *better* institutions, but how do we get there? In order to get a range of perspectives on that question, I conducted interviews with a number of mid-level managers within their institutions, folks I consider to be leading the process of transformative change. Nearly all of them pointed to the need for collaboration, for listening, for mutual support, and so on, in order to create the ground on which transformation can grow. As Chris Bourg said to me, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” And this is true throughout our institutions: our success at the department level, the college level, the university level, all depends upon our becoming and acting as a collective, on developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear.
+
+
+<img width="400" src="images/lgcover.jpg" alt="Cover of Leading Generously">
+
+Note: So the book is structured in three sections: first, "The Problem," which includes two longish chapters, one focusing on the crisis in higher education and one exploring ideas about leadership deriving from management literature and other sources; second, "The Tools," which has 12 short chapters exploring values-oriented concepts that can help support more generous, collaborative forms of leadership; and third, "The Stories," 5 case studies unpacking particular examples deriving from my interviews that show transformative leadership in action. Whether it all adds up convincingly is I think a matter for the discussion ahead.
+
+
+## Hope is a discipline.
+### *--Mariame Kaba*
+
+Note: But I want to wrap this portion of our conversation today up by saying that I recognize that reimagining leadership in ways that might help guide higher education out of the crises by which it is beset requires a lot in the way of hope for the future. That hope doesn't come easily right now, but as Mariame Kaba has argued, hope is not an emotion, not optimism, but instead hope is a discipline. It's something that has to be *practiced*, day in and day out. And if practiced thoughtfully and well, that hope can be part of developing a future in which higher education can genuinely serve the public good.
+
+
+## questions
+- What do you consider to be your most important experience of transformative leadership, whether you were the leader or you were guided by someone else's leadership? What were your goals, and how did this moment of leadership support them?
+- What are the key challenges you see for leaders in the current environment? How might we work together toward solutions?
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz<span>@</span>hcommons.social // kfitz<span>@</span>msu.edu</smaller><br />
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+<!doctype html>
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+# Leading Generously
+---
+### Tools for Transformation
+---
+<br />
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
+<small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/indiana251110.html</small>
+
+Note: Thank you so much for that introduction! 
+
+
+<img width="400" src="images/lgcover.jpg" alt="Cover of Leading Generously">
+
+Note: I'm delighted to be here today to talk with you a bit about *Leading Generously*. There are multiple origin stories for this book, but one of them is seeded in a protracted crisis at my own institution, Michigan State University. I'm not going to re-tell the whole story today, but instead just note that in the eight-plus years that I worked there, MSU has had six presidents and five provosts, and of the . The institution has also experienced massive conflict with and within our board of trustees and all of us are living through a resulting melange of anger and despair and exhaustion that seriously inhibits our ability to focus on the things that are most important to us.
+
+
+## crisis
+
+Note: But thinking about what our institution has experienced in recent years as a "crisis" feels so obvious as to say absolutely nothing about what's actually happening. We are surrounded by crisis in the academy (not to mention the world beyond) and while our circumstances at MSU have perhaps been more intense than at other institutions, to say that we have been facing an "institutional crisis" feels redundant.
+
+
+## <span style="color:red">permanent</span> crisis
+
+Note: Institutions like ours are in many ways built on a foundation of crisis. As Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon have explored in their book *Permanent Crisis*, the long history of the rhetoric of crisis, especially in the humanities, can be traced back to the establishment of the German university system, which of course gave shape to much of the structure of research universities in the contemporary United States. Reitter and Wellmon argue, in fact, that the existence of the humanities in the modern era is dependent upon that sense of crisis:
+
+
+> <smaller>“For nearly a century and a half, claims about a 'crisis of the humanities' have constituted a genre with remarkably consistent features: anxiety about modern agents of decay, the loss of authority and legitimacy, and invocations of 'the human' in the face of forces that dehumanize and alienate humans from themselves, one another, and the world. These claims typically lead to the same, rather paradoxical conclusion: <span style="color:red">modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities.</span> Without a sense of crisis, the humanities would have neither purpose nor direction.” (Reitter and Wellmon 132)</smaller>
+
+Note: noting that talk of a "crisis in the humanities" rest on claims that "modernity destroys the humanities, but only the humanities can redeem modernity, a circular story of salvation in which overcoming the crisis of modernity is the mission of the humanities." And perhaps it is true that we in the humanities -- or is it the liberal arts more broadly? or even the university as a whole? -- we rely on our sense of crisis, our sense of swimming against the larger cultural tides, to give us purpose. Much of the work that we as scholars do, after all, is structured by critique, and without our distance from the cultural and institutional center we can neither obtain the perspective nor sustain the motivation necessary to studying the ways that our world structures and is structured by its representations.
+
+On the other hand. There are some particularities to the situation of our institutions today -- the threats that our colleges, our departments, our fields, and our researchers and instructors face -- that are not simply rhetorical, and it's worth paying some careful attention to the specifics of these crises, which include:
+
+
+- the <span class="fragment highlight-red">labor</span> crisis<br />
+- the <span class="fragment highlight-red">economic</span> crisis<br />
+- the <span class="fragment highlight-red">political</span> crisis
+
+Note: (**CLICK**) **The labor crisis**. Over the last couple of decades, we've watched as more and more good positions -- with job security, adequate salaries, full benefits, and above all academic freedom -- have been sucked into the gig economy. The effects of this labor crisis are manifold: as fewer and fewer faculty members have access to the benefits of tenure, and thus the voice in shared governance required to have a real impact on the institution's directions, our fields and our departments appear decreasingly vibrant, drawing in diminishing numbers of students, thus making the case for our apparent obsolescence.
+- (**CLICK**) This of course works hand-in-hand with **the economic crisis** that our institutions are mired in. As public funding provides a smaller and smaller portion of university budgets, the costs of higher education have shifted radically from the state to individual students and their families. As those costs escalate, the pressure on students to think of higher education as a market exchange grows. If they're going to sink tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of dollars into the purchase of a four-year degree, it's not the least bit surprising that students would also face increasing pressure to select a degree program that seems to promise an obvious career outcome. And thus majors that are named after jobs or industries grow, and those that aren't shrink, providing further evidence that new investments in those fields are a luxury that our institutions, like our students, cannot afford.
+- (**CLICK**) And in the midst of all that, there is of course **the political crisis**, which has been brewing for decades but has taken a particularly acute turn in the last few years. The attacks that we've seen on critical race theory, the moves to ban books from libraries, the attempts to eradicate tenure, the growing interference in the curriculum -- all provide evidence of a growing backlash against the critical functions that the humanities bring to bear.
+I point to all of this in order to suggest that neither the threats we face nor the work we have ahead are rhetorical. They are instead very material, and they demand material responses.
+
+
+![Yellow background with a drawing of a lightbulb whose filament is shaped like a brain](images/generosity.jpg)
+
+Note: So part of my goal in *Leading Generously* is to demonstrate that we have at hand some of the means of responding to the crises faced by our fields and our institutions, and that we can demonstrate through the ways that we do our work a better path for the future of the university at large. I argued in *Generous Thinking* that rebuilding a relationship of trust between the university, its internal communities, and the publics that we serve requires re-grounding the institution by building community and solidarity both on campus and across the campus borders. This kind of change requires concerted effort to make clear that the real good of higher education is social rather than individual, and renewing that sense of higher education as a public good encourages us to think about the public modes for our work, including community-engaged research and open publishing processes, that might help us better demonstrate the good that we do, especially in hard times. 
+
+
+## change
+
+Note: But embracing these ways of working requires deep institutional change, in order to ensure that work is valued and supported. And it requires not only transforming the ways that we value and reward public work, but also creating the policies that can help us account for and support public work, and adopting the processes and platforms that can bring public work to life. And this is just one piece of the overarching change that our institutions need.
+
+
+## how
+
+Note: By the time *Generous Thinking* came out, it had already become clear to me that I had some follow-up work to do, that I needed to dig far deeper into the process of and the conditions for transformation. And then after a talk I gave at Virginia Tech in October 2019, an attendee asked a question that's been stuck in the back of my head ever since: generosity is all well and good, she said, and something that's relatively easy to embrace when we're flush, but how do we practice generosity in hard times? Can we afford to be generous when we're facing significant budget cuts, for instance, or is it inevitable that we fall back into analytics-driven competition with every unit -- much less every worker -- out to protect their own resources and their own privileges?
+
+I don't remember exactly how I answered then. I suspect that it was some combination of "you're completely right; that's the real question" and "the difficulties involved in being generous in hard times are precisely why we need to practice generosity in a determined way in good times." And I may have said some things about the importance of transparency in priority-setting and decision-making, and of involving the collective in that process.
+
+But I do know that as I stood there saying whatever I said, I was thinking "wow, this is hard, I don't know." I don't know how we find the wherewithal to remain generous when times are bad, except by having practiced generosity enough to have developed some individual and institutional muscle memory, and by recommitting ourselves to our basic values again and again. And I especially don't know how we remain generous at a moment when our institutions are approaching us — we who work for them, as well as we who rely on them — invoking the notion of a shared sacrifice required to keep the institution running. I don't know because I want the institution to survive, and I want to maintain the community that it enables, but I also know that the sacrifices that are called for are never genuinely equitably distributed.
+
+
+![Protester in mask](images/protest.jpg)
+<smaller>https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
+
+Note: We have seen all kinds of evidence in recent years of the painful inequities on our campuses, and have had proven to us that no matter how much we might love and support them, our institutions do not, and cannot love us in return. These institutions have long been dedicated first and foremost to their own survival, and we've seen that priority play out in a wide range of decisions that privilege the security of the institution over the well-being of the people it comprises. I include in this category the choice to prioritize the flow of tuition dollars over the safety of students and staff by returning too hastily to in-person instruction; the choice to prioritize institutional reputation over individual safety and dignity by suppressing, ignoring, and dismissing complaints of sexual harassment and assault; the choice to respond to calls for racial justice with superficial statements and underfunded add-on measures; and the choice to respond to civil protest with an increasingly militarized police presence. All of these choices share the conviction that the institution is far more important than the people for whom it exists. And all of them have led me to ask what would be required for us to remake the university as an institution that is structurally capable of living up to its duty of care for all its members, rather than seeking in a moment of crisis to minimize its obligations and ensure that all of its relationships remain forever contingent?
+
+
+## collective action
+
+Note: One key thing that transforming the university would require is collective action. Because no single leader can change things in a system this broken. We might make some headway together, but first we have to build that together and find ways to ensure that our commitment to together supersedes and outlasts the pressures we experience as individuals. Because right now, the primary way that the idea of "together" gets invoked -- as in "we're all in it together" -- is not in the context of resource or power-sharing but of sacrifice. And sacrifice tends to roll downhill, and accelerate in the process. This is how we wind up with furloughs and layoffs among contract faculty and staff at the same time we find ourselves with a new Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice.
+
+
+## structures
+
+Note: The only way to prevent anything, including something as metaphoric as sacrifice, from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. So my focus right now is on those structures, on what is required for us collectively to build a more generous environment in which we can do our work together. I'm far less interested in radicalizing individual leaders who can rise through the administrative ranks than I am in building cohorts of leaders who can work together to transform those ranks. 
+
+
+>  “the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working.” (Interview with Dianne Harris)
+
+Note: This is true not least because, as Dianne Harris told me, "the model of the single leader who carries everything themselves, who is heroic-seeming and so on, is super toxic, and outdated, and not working." That heroic model of individual leadership is damaging not just to the institution, whose welfare lies at the mercy of such an executive's successful navigation of an increasingly complex economic, cultural, and political landscape, but also to the well-being of that executive, who must convincingly appear omniscient and invulnerable and who will inevitably fail at pulling that off. We need a new framework for academic leadership that is collective and collaborative rather than individual, enabling leadership to become a mode of connection that can be centered anywhere within the org chart where people have ideas about how to make things better. If we can come to appreciate and authorize the collective potential that exists within our institutions, we can begin to make them not only more generous but more resilient.
+
+
+## agency
+
+Note: In addition to the notion that leadership must of necessity be an individual quality, there's a second bit of conventional wisdom that *Leading Generously* is working against: the relative powerlessness of individuals in their encounters with the structures and systems of contemporary life. This sense of powerlessness derives both from some highly problematic sources — those who benefit from existing structures and systems and would prefer everyone else just let them do their thing — and from some misunderstandings of critical theories of power in contemporary culture. Those theories describe the issues they explore as _systemic_ rather than _individual_, arguing that real change must be structural, building institutions, creating governments, enacting laws, reshaping economies in ways that work toward equity rather than supporting privilege. All of that demands something much larger and harder than personal transformation — but we misunderstand the import of those theories if we assume they mean that individual action doesn't matter. The individual matters, deeply: just perhaps not the way we think.
+
+When I argue that the complicated process of culture change can begin anywhere in the org chart, that any person (and not just the uniquely heroic leader) can be a change agent, I don't mean to suggest that the problems we face originate with individual behavior, or that any given person's change of heart can change the world. But if our goals include building institutions that are structurally capable of supporting and facilitating the work of creating better communities and a better world, individuals have to find ways to become empowered, because the institutions we have today aren't going to transform themselves.
+
+It's a matter of where we locate agency, of who has the ability to make significant change in the world. If we understand power as residing in the structures and systems that govern our lives, or as the unique privilege of those with rank and status within those structures and systems, there is little agency left to the rest of us. And it's certainly true that the problems we face are enormous, and that one person without structural authority can't do much to change the world — but groups of people can. Groups of people working together can form coalitions and mobilize them to develop new organizational structures with collectivity at their center. Building those coalition begins with the energy of individuals who decide to put their agency to work in solidarity with others.
+
+
+## resistance
+
+Note: That decision is a big one, and it often requires overcoming a great deal of resistance, both internal and external. Many so-called "permanent faculty" on campus don't particularly consider themselves to be responsible for their institutions, in no small part because the institution isn't our primary point of identification. We're encouraged instead to think of ourselves as free agents of a sort, more accountable to our fields than to colleagues down the hall (much less the next building over). Worse, the growing percentage of contingent faculty rarely have the chance to feel any sort of connection to their institutions, precisely because those institutions are structured to offer them no toe-holds whatsoever. And staff members rarely have the kinds of job security and other privilege that faculty receive, and so work in a coerced silence, either fearing for their jobs if they speak out or all too aware that their voices will be ignored. All the while those of us who can speak out in relative safety don't, often feeling that fixing the institution isn't our job, that it should be left to the folks who are paid the big bucks to run things. But retreating into the work for which we are rewarded, and willingly handing off the running of our universities to an ever-thickening rank of upper administrators, has contributed mightily to getting us into this mess. The longer I stare at it, the more I believe that we collectively not only have the ability but also the responsibility to step forward, to take action, and to demonstrate that not only do we belong to the institution, but it also belongs to us.
+
+
+## leadership
+
+Note:  We need a new *collective* model for academic leadership not least because the crises in which our institutions are mired indicate that the model under which we currently labor is irreparably broken. I want to be clear in what I'm saying here: there are some very good people doing the best work they can in many of our campus leadership roles. It's not the people that need replacing, or at least not *all* of the people, and in fact the exercise of replacing them with new leaders with new visions has become a form of institutional deck-chair-rearranging. The problem lies rather with the structures within and through which they work. That's the model of academic leadership we need to contend with, a model with its boards and its presidents and its innumerable vice-presidents that comes to us directly from the hierarchical structures of corporate governance. Those structures are ill-suited to the operation of non-profit entities in general, as can be seen in the extensive recent literature on reimagining non-profit leadership. And those structures are doing grave damage to the purposes of higher education.
+
+
+## “like a business”
+
+Note: This is why our campus values statements die a little every time that someone says that the university should be run more like a business: because all of our institutions already *are* being run like businesses, and long have been. Of course, what that someone means when they say that the university should be run more like a business is that we should be keeping a closer eye on the bottom line, we should be relentless in our pursuit of innovation, we should be eliminating the product lines that aren't producing sufficient revenue, we should be keeping our front-line labor in check, and so on. All of which we've been subjected to for decades now, and all of which has contributed to the sorry state we're in. 
+
+
+## competitive
+
+Note: Even worse, however, the unspoken parts of "like a business," the individualist, competitive models for success that are foundational to corporate structures, are actively preventing our institutions from flourishing. This is true not just at the micro-level, where each individual student and employee is required to compete for resources, but also at the macro-level, where our institutions are required to square off in the marketplace rather than develop any kinds of cross-institutional collaborations that could lift the entire sector rather than creating the rankings-driven lists of winners and losers that surround us today.
+
+So here's the core of my argument: universities are not meant to be profit centers, and shouldn't be run that way. They are rather shared infrastructures dedicated to a form of mutual aid, in which those who have -- in this case, knowledge -- support those who need, with the goal of producing a more just and equitable society.  
+
+
+## mutual aid
+
+Note: Dean Spade defines mutual aid as "collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse." And as Peter Kropotkin argued at the turn of the 20th century, mutual aid, mutual protection, and mutually beneficial cooperation have been as important to the development of both animal and human societies as the Darwinian mode of competition for survival. In fact, though history focuses on the role of conflict in societies -- it makes for a more thrilling narrative than does cooperation -- Kropotkin indicates the significance of mutual aid for our subjects of study:
+
+
+> <smaller>“the practice of mutual aid and its successive developments have created the very conditions of society life in which man was enabled to develop his <span style="color:red">arts, knowledge, and intelligence</span>; and that the periods when institutions based on the mutual-aid tendency took their greatest development were also the periods of the greatest progress in <span style="color:red">arts, industry, and science.</span>” (Kropotkin 296)</smaller>
+
+Note: (**READ SLIDE**) The development, then, all of the forms of knowledge studied across our campuses, required mutual aid. And they still require mutual aid in order to continue their work. And that need should press us to consider that the ideal model for the university is not the corporation but the cooperative, in which every member has a stake in the successful outcome of the whole, and is as a result committed to full participation in its processes.
+
+
+## coalition / leadership
+
+Note: In collective models such as that of the co-op, leadership is of necessity coalition-based rather than hierarchical. It is both built *from* relationships and in order to *sustain* relationships. And this is a model that I would like to see us espouse for the future of academic leadership. I'll acknowledge, though, that "coalition" and "leadership" may not seem to go together terrifically well, at least in the conventional model. I tend to think, however, that our use of the term "leadership" is often a misleading euphemism.
+
+
+## management
+
+Note: In fact, most of what comes down to us from above is management rather than leadership. Don't get me wrong; good management is crucial to any organization. Management, as John Kotter has argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on organizing and directing the people and resources necessary to conduct an organization's work. Leadership, by contrast, is a matter of "coping with change." This is a distinction with a difference for Kotter, who has argued that most organizations today are 
+
+
+## “over-managed and under-led”
+
+Note: "over-managed and under-led," and universities are no exception. At every level of our institutions, we have been disciplined into an inability to cope with -- much less create -- change. Transforming our ideas about campus leadership could allow us to people together to create change, to model and to create the conditions for more thoughtful, more inclusive, more just ways of working. Leadership, in other words, ought to be about building the relationships necessary for collective action. It should be connective, and compassionate, and generative. And it could emerge anywhere in an institution, if cultivated.
+
+
+## cultivation
+
+Note: I choose the metaphor of cultivation pointedly, thanks to Beronda Montgomery, whose brilliant book _Learning from Plants_ explores the ways that an understanding of botanical life can help us develop more  supportive, more collectively attuned ways of working in human communities. As Montgomery argues, learning from plants encourages us to focus on remediating the environments within which we work together rather than attributing the difficulties some individuals experience in taking root and growing in those environments to internal deficits. This approach also calls upon us to develop a new kind of leadership "vision," one that can
+
+
+> <smaller>“adapt to changing circumstances, and … enable leaders to see the potential collaborations and benefits in diverse communities. This approach contrasts with the traditional <span style="color:red">gatekeeping</span> approach, in which leaders determine who gains access via conceptualizations and assumptions about who can function and thrive in a particular context. Instead, this distinct form of leadership is sense driven and environmentally adaptive; it attends to individuals while at the same time tending the ecosystems in which these individuals exist. I call this form of leadership <span style="color:red"> groundskeeping</span>, in recognition of what we know about the conditions that plants need to successfully thrive.” (Montgomery 149)</smaller> 
+
+Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** Organic metaphors such as groundskeeping and cultivation allow us to think about leadership as something that is grown rather than owned or inhabited, requiring an awareness that our institutions and organization are more akin to ecosystems than they are to the org charts we draw to represent them. Leaders must work in concert with their ecosystems, rather than operating from the top-down management perspective to which we have become accustomed.
+
+
+## re-organize
+
+Note: So how do we re-organize ourselves in ways that will enable us to create the change that our campuses so desperately need? In order to get a range of perspectives on that question, I conducted interviews with a number of mid-level managers within their institutions, folks I consider to be leading the process of transformative change. Nearly all of them pointed to the need for collaboration, for listening, for mutual support, and so on, in order to create the ground on which transformation can grow. As Chris Bourg said to me, “The leadership skills for the future of higher education are 100% coalition-building and relationships.” And this is true throughout our institutions: our success at the department level, the college level, the university level, all depends upon our becoming and acting as a collective, on developing and relying on the relationships that can enable us to establish and achieve the shared goals we hold most dear. And that process -- determining what our shared goals are and should be, and how we should go about striving toward them together -- requires a kind of interrelation that is not merely personal but also, and of necessity, political.
+
+
+## <span style="color:red">politics</span>
+
+Note: When I talk about politics in this context, I mean to point to Iris Marion Young's definition in _Justice and the Politics of Difference_:
+
+
+> “all aspects of <span style="color:red">institutional organization, public action, social practices and habits, and cultural meanings</span> insofar as they are potentially subject to collective evaluation and decisionmaking” (Young 9)
+
+Note: (**READ SLIDE**) and in particular her argument that “the concept of justice coincides with the concept of the political,” arguing that every effort must be made to enhance collective evaluation and decision-making if we are to create the possibility for just institutions.
+
+
+## “shared governance”
+
+Note: In most colleges and universities in the US, the potential for "collective evaluation and decision-making" is contained within the structures of shared governance. Those bodies, including a wide range of working groups, committees, and senates, serve to gather faculty and (in some cases) staff opinions and perspectives on many questions concerning the operation of our institutions. On a few such questions — such as the curriculum — those bodies exercise a kind of ownership, and the decisions issuing from them have the mark of authority. On many campuses, however, and on many issues, faculty and staff governance is advisory at best: votes are taken, decisions are made and communicated to the administration, and that's it. The administration has the freedom to take those resolutions up and act upon them, or to ignore them at will.
+
+
+## bureaucratic
+
+Note: As a result, the collective deliberation and decision-making bodies on many campuses have become less political, in Young's sense, than bureaucratic, functioning in order to function rather than bearing the potential for change. "Bureaucracies," Young notes, "are distinguished from other forms of social organization in operating according to impersonal rules that apply in the same way to all cases." Young goes on to note, of course, that bureaucracy as we experience it at the level of the state developed in order to replace individual sovereignty and its less rational whims with the rule of law. Similarly, the principles and processes of shared governance on campus attempt to mitigate the unjust imposition of an administrator's opinions on faculty and staff functions. But an over-reliance on and even subjugation to those principles and processes runs the risk of making the bureaucracies through which we operate seem politically neutral and eternal and unchangeable.
+
+
+## merit
+
+Note: As Young points out, "the values of bureaucratic organization" indicate that decisions should be made "according to merit." And while the reliance on merit in bureaucracy is, she notes, among "the important positive developments in the history of social organization," what is missing is a deep engagement with and debate concerning the meaning and determination of _merit itself_. Our institutions have devised metrics and processes that allow us to believe that merit is a quantifiable thing we can assess outside the realm of the political. But merit as a category is always and inevitably ideological, in providing a common-sense explanation that transforms highly contingent relations of domination into something apparently natural. As Young argues:
+
+
+> <smaller>“The rules and policies of any institution serve particular ends, embody particular values and meanings, and have identifiable consequences for the actions and situation of the persons within or related to these institutions. All of these things are open to challenge, and politics is the process of struggle and deliberation about such rules and policies, the ends they serve, and the values they embody. The ideology of <span style="color:red">merit</span> seeks to <span style="color:red">depoliticize</span> the establishment of criteria and standards for allocating positions and awarding benefits.” (Young 211)</smaller>
+
+Note: **(READ SLIDE.)** That depoliticization sounds like a good thing — making the awarding of benefits as objective a process as possible — up until we remember that the individual people involved in defining and implementing these processes are not and can never be objective. We are all inescapably subjective, bringing our own experiences and perspectives to everything we judge. What depoliticization means in the bureaucratic, and particularly in the meritocratic, is a closing-off of the opportunities for debating the criteria, the processes, and the objectives through which we might keep notions like merit from becoming forms of oppression. As it becomes depoliticized, bureaucracy errs in treating the rules as the _ends_ that it seeks, rather than a _means_ to those ends.
+
+
+## peer review
+
+Note: Take, for example, peer review. I've written extensively about this, and I won't rehash all of that here. But one key point has to do with the role that anonymity plays in the process. Anonymizing the submissions that undergo peer review for publication began as a means of mitigating the influence of reviewer bias based on the identity of the author. The goal was admirable and its success has been appreciable, enabling the work of marginalized scholars to gain purchase in the highest levels of academic discourse. What anonymity did not do, however, and cannot do, is _eliminate_ bias, which will always find ways to creep back in around the edges as, for instance, critiques of subject matter, methodology, and cited sources become proxies for status based on identity and serve as ostensibly neutral means of reinforcing hierarchies within fields. Again, the intent of these rules and procedures is admirable, but they can never provide for the fullness of justice, precisely because they are treated as if they are sources of objectivity, when they are always designed and implemented by individuals with specific subjectivities.
+
+
+## values
+
+Note: Moreover, trying to change the rules and procedures to make them _more_ objective is laudable, but cannot help but introduce new areas in which objectivity is in question. Ultimately, as Young argues, the goal should be not to exclude subjectivity or "personal values" from decision-making, but rather to make that subjectivity and those personal values fully part of the decision-making process itself, as she notes that these values are "inevitably and properly part of what decisionmaking is about." So rather than trying to make peer review more bias-free, what if we were instead to embrace its deeply political nature, to make it more transparent and participatory, and to ask authors and reviewers alike to surface and contend with their values as a part of the process?
+
+
+## processes and policies
+
+Note: Similarly, we might think of the ways that tenure and promotion processes and policies are implemented. These structures have been designed to protect candidates from the personal whims or animus of administrators as cases move through the approval hierarchy. And yet that bureaucracy has the potential to interfere with justice in its requirement that all cases be treated identically. As Young notes of the gap between bureaucracy and truly democratic collective action, "Decisions and actions will be evaluated less according to whether they are right or just than according to their legal validity, that is, whether they are consistent with the rules and follow the appropriate procedures." This is encoded in the appeals process for promotion and tenure denials at many institutions, where the acceptable range of inquiry is restricted to whether the process was conducted in accordance with the rules, rather than whether the final determination was just, much less whether the process as constituted was capable of producing a just result. 
+
+Changing processes like peer review or tenure and promotion in order to surface rather than avoid subjective bias, one might reasonably argue, would make those processes political. And yet it's clear to just about everyone who has ever been through such a process that those decisions and processes _have always been political_, and will always remain political. That's not in and of itself a bad thing. We should not want to remove politics from the ways that we engage with one another on campus, but rather to create an environment in which we can embrace politics, rendering all of us able to participate wholly, fully, with the most open and honest intent in the processes through which our lives are inevitably structured.
+
+
+### politics : leadership :: bureaucracy : management
+
+Note: So what does all of this have to do with leadership? If management, as Kotter argued, is focused on "coping with complexity," on ensuring the optimal functioning of entangled structures and organizations, we might begin to intuit a relationship between management and bureaucracy. Establishing rules and processes, ensuring that they're followed, remediating them when they fail, all require careful management. And again, good management remains important, as anyone who has ever worked with a poor manager can attest. But if management is about ensuring that things get done with maximum efficiency, it's also about minimizing everything that can interfere with that efficiency, including — and perhaps especially — dissent. Management is in this sense necessarily depoliticizing; it requires foreclosing debate and smoothing the way for prescribed action. This is one reason why the good management needed for making the status quo function often cannot contend with change: when an organization tries to manage change, it too often ends up with a manufactured consent that squelches the political and moves decision-making outside the realm of debate.
+
+
+## leading generously
+
+Note: If leadership, as Kotter contrasts it with management, focuses on "coping with change," good leadership must of necessity be political at heart. Leadership requires embracing and facilitating the kinds of open debate, dissent, and even struggle necessary for making the best possible decisions about what an organization should do and how it should do it. Leadership requires making room for the broadest possible participation in decision-making, and it requires developing the relationships and coalitions necessary to ensure that the resulting decisions are understood and embraced. Leadership is about creating the conditions necessary for the many people within an organization to contribute to and feel ownership of the organization's future.
+
+The path to developing more generous forms of academic leadership, then, leads directly through politics, through political organizing, through coalition-building, through solidarity. Our institutions, our fields, and our colleagues have suffered enormously under the competitive corporate regimes to which we've been subjected. If there's going to be change, it's not going to come from above; it has to be led by us. Not that we need more administrators to rise out of the faculty, but rather that the faculty might begin to model new cooperative structures that can serve as starting points for the radical rethinking of academic hierarchies. If we can work collectively, we have the potential to create alternatives to the failed model of individualist academic leadership and its basis in the principles of the corporate economy. We can work together to develop properly politicized cultures of mutual aid based on collective action within our departments. We can ensure that our departments similarly interact with one another based on principles of mutual support. And we can demonstrate what it would mean for an institution to live out the values espoused in its mission statement.
+
+I recognize that all of this requires a lot in the way of hope for the future, and I will admit that my usual commitment to understanding hope as a discipline, in Mariame Kaba's phrase, has been struggling a bit this year. I am trying to bear in mind Dean Spade's conviction that "crisis conditions require bold tactics" and that the boldest of these is mutual aid. True cooperation and collective action might provide a path out of the crises by which we're beset, and in fact toward a future in which higher education can genuinely serve the public good.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
+
+Note: Many thanks.
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+![KC logo](images/KCommons.png)
+### Open Science for the Public Good
+---
+
+<img style="float: right" src="images/nsf_logo.png" width="100" alt="NSF logo" /><br />
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
+<small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/nsf250930.html</small><br />
+<small>This work has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants No. OAC-2226271 and OAC-2531819.</small><br clear=all />
+
+Note: I'm project director of Knowledge Commons, an open-access, community-governed, nonprofit network on which knowledge creators across the disciplines and around the world can deposit and share their work, build new collaborations, and create a vibrant digital presence for themselves, their teams, and their projects.
+
+
+<img src="images/mlacommons2.png" alt="MLA Commons">
+
+Note: Knowledge Commons began as a project of the Modern Language Association, the largest scholarly society in the humanities. In 2012 I was serving as the association's first Director of Scholarly Communication, and was working to think about how the digital transformation was changing not only the ways that scholars communicated with one another but also the reasons they joined professional societies. In the past, getting access to the society's journal or attending the annual meeting was focal, but those drivers were becoming less important. We posited, however, that the ability to *participate* in the ongoing conversations sponsored by the society would be a draw, and so in 2013 we launched **MLA Commons**, the first node on what would become the Knowledge Commons network.
+
+
+![KC home page](images/kcommons-092925.png)<small>https://hcommons.org</small>
+
+Note: Knowledge Commons thus has its roots in the humanities, which have been historically underserved in the research infrastructure space; when we first began work on the project, not only did few research communication platforms include the humanities in their fields of interest, but those that did too often lumped all arts and humanities fields together in a single bucket (while maintaining infinite distinctions among the various subfields of physics and chemistry), with the result that even those scholars who wanted to use these platforms to make their work openly available to the world had trouble getting traction, because their community of practice could not find them and coalesce around the shared work.
+
+
+- We began developing the Commons with the sense that, in encouraging knowledge creators of all kinds to do more of their work in open, collaborative ways, the most significant problem we needed to solve was social rather than technical: we needed to encourage not just individual scholars but scholarly *communities* to join us, to find and engage with one another in building a digital commons. In growing the Commons we first reached out the fields adjacent to modern languages, launching the interdisciplinary **Humanities Commons** in 2016.
+
+
+- In 2018, recognizing that the Commons was becoming larger than a consortium of scholarly societies with tiny budgets could manage, we migrated the network to Michigan State University, where the project has been overseen by the lab I established there, with significant support from an Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant from the **National Endowment for the Humanities** and a Change Capital grant from the Mellon **Foundation**, among a range of other funders and donors. That funding allowed us to build a development team able to take on some significant technical debt that had begun to accrue, as well as a community engagement team that could help drive Commons adoption.
+
+
+- At MSU, however, we began to realize, first, that focusing our fundraising efforts on driving participation among scholarly societies was unlikely to allow us to reach sustainability, both due to their budget constraints and to their assumptions about what their members needed -- instead, appealing to *institutions* to join and support the network was likely a better path forward. We also saw that driving such institutional participation would require us to serve the campus as a whole, rather than a small subset of the campus that was too often underfunded.
+
+
+- Our first step toward that broadened interdisciplinarity began in 2021, when we were approached by a group of STEM education researchers at MSU who were seeking ways to build connections and communication across their often siloed fields. They needed a platform on which they could collaborate to develop the principles and practices through which their community might be encouraged to share their work -- and their data -- with one another, and with the world. The STEM Ed+ group approached the Commons to begin this collaboration based on our articulation of the **values** that bring us to Open Science as well as our focus on building community, which come together in our development of a **community governance** structure to ensure that the platform develops with the needs of its institutional and individual members front and center.
+
+
+- We began our work with the STEM Ed+ teach by talking with STEM education researchers both at MSU and elsewhere in order to find out more about their needs, as well as about the values that guided their work. In the process, we heard about several key issues that they face:
+	- the obligation to make certain that the benefits of community-engaged research accrue not just to university-based researchers but to the communities with which they work
+	- the desire to share the results of research as openly as possible while ensuring that  often vulnerable communities remain in control of the data gathered about them
+	- the need to develop mechanisms for sharing work and establishing new collaborations across often siloed communities of practice 
+- Through these early discussions, we began to sketch out the principles behind **STEM Ed+ Commons**, a network through which STEM education researchers can learn more about the **FAIR and CARE principles** behind Open Science and deliberate together about the means of putting them into practice.
+- The **FAIR principles** for data stewardship form the heart of the FAIROS program: ensuring that the products of research are made findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, such that the entire scientific community as well as the general public can benefit from them.
+- In addition to FAIR, however, we have embraced the **CARE principles** developed by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. These principles encourage open data movements to consider the communities involved in data gathering and sharing by providing for:
+	- **Collective Benefit** -- or building data systems whose design allows communities to derive benefit from the data gathered about them
+	- **Authority to Control** -- which empowers communities to control their own data and determine its appropriate use
+	- **Responsibility** -- ensuring that researchers are accountable to the communities they work with
+	- **Ethics** -- making certain that the rights and well-being of people involved in scientific research are of primary concern.
+- Our STEM education colleagues sought to bring the FAIR and CARE principles to bear in developing the open systems supporting their work as part of a larger goal: broadening participation in science and transforming the research enterprise through the embrace of an "ours, not mine" view of access, expertise, resources, and power, thus instantiating deep collaboration as a norm. These goals fully aligned with those espoused by the Knowledge Commons team, allowing us to begin thinking about how our platform might be enhanced to serve their needs.
+- Those necessary enhancements encouraged us to take a hard look at our existing repository, which we had built in Fedora; while it served the humanities community well enough by allowing for the deposit and sharing of a wide range of document types, a more robust, interoperable repository infrastructure was necessary if we were to make the platform appealing and useful across all disciplines.
+- With generous support from the inaugural round of NSF FAIROS RCN grants in 2022, we built STEM Ed+ Commons, and in the process rebuilt our repository in **InvenioRDM**, the platform developed by CERN as an abstracted, self-hosted version of the software supporting Zenodo. InvenioRDM is an open-source platform allowing for the development of turn-key research data management repositories, and boasts a robust community of developers working across a wide range of institutions and research organizations around the world.
+- Our work was led by our repository developer, Ian Scott, who connected with and learned from the Invenio community, and who is now an active contributor to that community's ongoing work. We did some significant development on top of Invenio in order to create a more user-friendly metadata gathering and deposit flow as well connecting the repository to the rest of the Knowledge Commons network.
+- The result is **KCWorks**, a next-generation repository hosting a wide range of research outputs from scholars across the disciplines and around the world. KCWorks boasts several key features, including:
+	- a user-friendly deposit flow that encourages users to provide key metadata about their work by breaking up the process into bite-size stages that describe the purposes of the information being requested;
+	- the ability to deposit up to 100 files as a single project, with a very generous 500GB size limit per record that can be overridden on request;
+	- robust use of persistent identifiers, including ORCIDs for contributors, DOIs for objects, and RORs (research organization registry) for institutions;
+	- deposit versioning, with versioned DOIs registered by DataCite;
+	- more than 70 contributor roles, extending far beyond the CRediT contributor role taxonomy to embrace and acknowledge research participation at every level;
+	- a wide range of user-selectable licenses applicable to data, documents, and software;
+	- granular access restrictions at both the record- and the file-level;
+	- a powerful viewer allowing many files to be read or streamed within the item record;
+	- COUNTER-compliant item-level analytics for record access and downloads, including both item- and version-level statistics;
+	- and machine-generated citations in a range of formats.
+- KCWorks also provides both individual and institutional users the ability to create collections, gathering deposits in highly customized ways -- by institution, by subfield, by research group, by publication, or as personalized user-defined playlists.
+- KCWorks makes use of the **FAST taxonomy**, or Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, which was developed by OCLC based on the Library of Congress Subject Headings, allowing depositors to select  topical, geographic, and chronological headings independently of one another. We also allow for robust user-defined keyword creation.
+- KCWorks is highly interoperable thanks to its strong **REST API** that connects with all repository operations and its built-in **OAI-PMH** server allowing the repository's metadata to be readily consumed. Upon deposit, record information is pushed both to the user's Knowledge Commons profile and to their ORCID profile, increasing research discoverability.
+- We're extremely proud of KCWorks, which today contains over **35,000 deposits in 96 languages** using a wide range of character sets. We were particularly delighted back in January of this year to announce that KCWorks had been selected as the officially designated public access repository of the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Alas, changes at the NEH led to that contract being terminated for convenience in April.)
+- But there's much more work ahead of us, both for the network as a whole and for our STEM Ed+ Commons users in particular.
+	- In the process of our focus groups and user interviews, we heard a lot of frustration about conventional journal-based publishing processes and the bottlenecks they create for researchers in sharing their work.
+	- especially when those users work in and with communities outside the academy
+	- open access journals help researchers who might not be affiliated with research universities or have access to research libraries read the latest work in their fields, but the business models that commercial publishers have created around open access -- whether involving APCs or so-called "transformative agreements" -- often prevent many researchers from contributing to that body of knowledge
+	- moreover the standard structures of peer review, while a crucial part of determining the body of accepted knowledge, results in a serious bottleneck, as the growing number of publications needing review has utterly swamped the available reviewer labor pool, producing at times inordinate delays before publication -- and even more, traditionally anonymized processes keeps peer review a conversation between editors and reviewers, preventing review from serving as a collaborative process that might best support the work's development
+	- and, finally, commercial control of research dissemination has enabled those same companies to hoover up enormously important data about research, now packaged into Current Research Information Systems that further extract value from research institutions through expensive licenses, with a dearth of open source alternatives
+- In our new project, funded in the most recent round of FAIROS grants, we propose to remove these bottlenecks in research dissemination by building a workflow that disentangles its various phases, producing instead a Publish-Review-Curate-Assess model that will allow scientific communication to proceed more collaboratively, more ethically, and more fluidly.
+	- In this model, KCWorks will become the primary locus of **publication**, as researchers deposit what are still somewhat anachronistically referred to as "pre-prints" alongside data and other research outputs.
+	- We will then connect KCWorks to a range of **review** and curation tools and communities, using the communication protocol developed by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, [COAR Notify](https://coar-notify.net). This will allow researchers to request peer review from communities such as Peer Community In and PreReview, and through platforms like Pilcrow, which supports collaborative community review. COAR Notify will also allow researchers to submit deposited work for consideration by editors of a range of journals and other collections, and will allow those editors to suggest submission of work they find interesting. These publications can then be **curated** into overlay publications that provide endorsement for the work based on the results of editorial and/or peer review.
+	- Both submission for peer review and submission for journal consideration will likely result in changes designed to improve the work, and subsequent versions can then be added to the deposit, each receiving a versioned DOI, with the top-level DOI always pointing to the most current version. In this way, we can finally reach the point at which scientific communication can let go of the notion of the "version of record," and instead emphasize the "record of versions," allowing the process of development to become a visible part of the work
+	- Additionally, the labor involved in both peer review and editorial work can be properly credited alongside that of researchers and authors, creating both a more ethical recognition of the key roles that that review and editing play in the production of research products as well as a mechanism by which those contributions might be taken into account as part of a scientist's record of "work"
+- That takes us through **the Publish-Review-Curate model**, which has been explored in a range of open science communities, including [PLOS Biology](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000116), [ASAPbio](https://asapbio.org/understanding-the-publish-review-curate-prc-model-of-scholarly-communication/), [MetaROR](https://cms.metaror.org/publish-review-curate/), and [eLife](https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/dc24a9cd/open-science-what-is-publish-review-curate). Publish-Review-Curate has been implemented as the research dissemination model for [Open Research Europe](https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu).
+- However, we are adding a fourth stage to this workflow, **Assess**, which recognizes the need to close the gap between the spaces online where researchers communicate their work and the spaces where they are able to track and report on its impact.
+	- Currently, KCWorks provides analytics on item-level views and downloads, with counts provided both for a specific version of a deposit as well as aggregated counts across all versions. Our statistics are **COUNTER**-compliant, and we anonymize all visitor-level information. We also filter out robot requests from our counts, including only human requests and human-initiated machine requests.
+	- We want, however, to provide depositors with as much useful information about the impact of their work as possible, without violating visitor privacy. We will thus be releasing in the next few weeks a new analytics dashboard for both users and groups, providing aggregated information about deposits. On this dashboard we'll be able to show which deposits in a given group have obtained the most traction, how their use has developed over time, as well as the country-level origins of view and download requests; we'll also show information about work in a collection by item type, by license, and more.
+	- In addition to these machine-generated analytics, however, we want to think about other means of demonstrating the impact of work in the repository. This might include the kinds of usage information provided by Altmetrics, which tracks links to work from social media and other referrers across the internet, but it also might include more bespoke indicators: comments left in a linked discussion, instructor-reported use of materials in course syllabi, and more.
+	- We intend to work with the **HumetricsHSS** team in order to explore the kinds of values-enacted, humane metrics that might most benefit researchers as they report on their work and design means of gathering and reporting on them.
+- Alongside this project, however, we are also working on two other crucial issues: **trust** and **sustainability**. It's not necessary for me to tell you that we are living in a moment in which trust in science is more challenged than it has been in recent memory. Some of these challenges are coming, as the joke has it, from inside the house: the ongoing reproducibility crisis, coupled with evidence of varying kinds of researcher malpractice have created understandable concerns about the integrity of scientific work. Some of these challenges derive from the world around us, however, as misunderstandings of the motivations of scientists and ideological conflicts surrounding inconvenient research combine to produce widespread dismissals of the knowledge produced through scientific research. And worse: there are growing concerns world-wide that politicians might interfere with scientific research or censor its results in highly damaging ways.
+- Researchers need to be confident that the work that they make available through our platform will remain accessible over the long term, without interference that could come in the form of technological decay, or in the form of bad actors seeking to alter the scientific record. Our platform includes a range of automated checks for both file and data integrity, but we also want to find ways to ensure that our servers and the work they share are protected from human interference, in order to provide a solid basis for trust in the scientific record.
+- We also need to ensure that we can afford to continue to make Knowledge Commons openly and freely available to researchers and interested members of the public. To that end we have recently launched KCWorks for Institutions, a hosted service that provides colleges and universities with a white-label portal for KCWorks, through which their communities can deposit and share their research, with an institutional dashboard tracking its impact, while the work remains discoverable through the repository as a whole. We're working with a pilot institution to migrate their collection out of a commercial system this fall, and hope to onboard several more institutions in the months ahead. As we're fond of saying, we're a better value -- definitely less expensive for institutions than our commercial competitors -- but we also offer better values, including our commitment to community governance.
+- But it's a hard moment to try to implement a new sustainability model relying on investment from institutions of higher education. And so I'm going to end here with a word of thanks for the NSF's ongoing support of this project; without this federal investment in FAIR Open Science, our project would quite literally not exist.
+- Thank you for your time; I'll look forward to hearing your questions.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz<span>@</span>hcommons.social // kfitz<span>@</span>msu.edu</smaller><br />
+
+Note: Many thanks.
--- a/talks250508.html
+++ b/talks250508.html
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+<!doctype html>
+<html lang="en">
+
+	<head>
+		<meta charset="utf-8">
+
+		<title>Thinking Openly</title>
+
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+
+
+            </div>
+		</div>
+
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--- a/talks250508.md
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+## Thinking Openly
+### Teaching and Learning in the Commons
+---
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu<br />
+MSU TALKS // 08 May 2025<br />
+presentations.kfitz.info/talks250508.html</smaller>
+
+Note: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be with you this morning for the in-person day of MSU TALKS! I want to thank Jeremy van Hof and the CTLI team for putting together such a great opportunity for instructors across Michigan State to share their thinking and learn from one another. Much of what I’m going to be talking about is focused on scholarly communication, but it has some deep resonances with what’s going on in the world of educational technology today. The tl;dr on this talk is that the future of knowledge creation depends heavily on the openness of the infrastructures that support our work. I know that for a lot of people, the word "infrastructure" triggers a yawn reflex -- like, oh great, a technical talk, do I really need to hear a lot about this? 
+
+
+> “Infrastructural systems are famously boring because the best possible outcome is nothing happening, or at least nothing unexpected or untoward.”
+> 
+> <span style="float:right;"><small>—Deb Chachra, <em>How Infrastructure Works</em> </small></span>
+
+Note: If that's your reaction, you're not alone. As Deb Chachra points out in her brilliant book, *How Infrastructure Works*, “Infrastructural systems are famously boring because the best possible outcome is nothing happening, or at least nothing unexpected or untoward.” The best thing that infrastructure can do is remain invisible and just work. But as Chachra also argues, the shape of our entire culture is dependent on our infrastructure, and where inequities are part of those systems’ engineering, they constrain the ways that culture can evolve.
+
+
+Infrastructure determines whether we can
+- foster social and epistemic justice
+- empower communities of practice
+- enable community-led decision making
+
+Note:  So infrastructure matters, and the infrastructures on which the scholarly community relies in order to build, develop, design, and publish our work have deep implications for our abilities to foster social and epistemic justice in higher education, to empower communities of practice and their concerns in the development and dissemination of knowledge, and to enable trustworthy governance and decision-making that is led by the communities that our publications and platforms are intended to serve. Succeeding in these goals requires commitment to the open, public infrastructures that can enable the work we do in higher education to become actually equitable.
+
+
+## actually equitable
+
+Note: What do I mean when I say "actually equitable"? I want to start by thinking for a second about the open access movement. We've heard a lot over the last twenty-plus years about the ways that open access can transform scholarly communication, and it's true that a lot has been done to make more research available to be read online. But the movement toward open access began as a means of attempting to break the stranglehold that a few extractive corporate publishers held over the research and publishing process -- and in that, it hasn't succeeded. The last decade in particular has revealed all of the resilience with which capital responds to challenges, as those publishers have in fact become more profitable than ever by figuring out how to exploit APCs, hybrid publishing models, and even whole new business plans like the so-called "read and publish" agreements that keep us tied to them. They've developed new platforms and infrastructures like discovery engines and research information management systems, and all of that serves to increase corporate lock-in over the work produced on campus.
+
+
+> “We became increasingly clear that OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research. We must assess the growth of OA against the gains and losses for these further ends. We must pick strategies to grow OA that are consistent with these further ends and bring us steadily closer to their realization.” <span style="float:right;"><small>—BOAI 20</small></span>
+
+Note: In fact, by the time the authors of the original Budapest statement reconvened in 2022 to celebrate its 20th anniversary, it was obvious that the dominant OA publishing mechanisms that had emerged in the interim had not had the desired impact, leading the BOAI 20 statement to argue that "OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research." Thanks to the resilience of the corporations that control the infrastructure of scholarly communication, open access in several key forms has if anything *reduced* equity, by attaching high fees to the formats and platforms that allow publications to circulate most widely. Scholars whose fields, institutions, or nations do not have ready access to grant funding or other means of subsidizing publishing fees thus get silenced, closed out of participation in sharing their work.
+
+
+![BOAI20 recommendation](images/BOAI20.png)
+<small>budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai20/</small>
+
+Note: It’s for this reason that the 20th anniversary Budapest recommendations led with a call to host open access research on open infrastructure, recognizing that the control of the infrastructure by profit-seeking entities cements inequities – and this is true even where those publishers purport to create opportunities for the disadvantaged by offering fee waivers and discounts on their publishing charges. Those discounts only serve to enshrine a model in which it is considered correct for those who produce knowledge to pay corporations to host and circulate it.
+
+
+## Wait, what?
+
+Note: I want to be super clear about what I mean by that. If it is true that the way things are currently done in the dominant forms of open access publishing today involves author-side fees, those fees, like all of  "the ways things are done" -- have become a normalized part of scholarly communication culture. To call it culture is not to diminish its significance at all. As Peter Drucker has long been quoted as saying,
+
+
+## "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."
+
+Note: "culture eats strategy for breakfast" in the corporate universe -- which is to say that the normalized, unspoken assumptions about the ways things are done will take precedence over all but the best-laid alternative plans, and because of that *real* strategic change often demands deep cultural transformation as a prerequisite.
+
+
+## fair use
+
+Note: Take, as an example, the case of "fair use," which as we all know is not a legally defined status with respect to the use of copyrighted materials, but rather a fuzzy affirmative defense posture requiring the defendant to prove their innocence in a courtroom that presumes their guilt. Fair use is a small and eternally at risk exception within a culture that is built on the presumption of the correctness of owner control, in other words. And as Susan Bielstein argues in *Permissions: A Survival Guide,* every time we ask permission to use an image or a quotation in a way that ought to be defensible under fair use, we weaken that exception, and we normalize the dominance of ownership, giving credence to corporate claims that we *ought* to be asking for permission at all times because that's *the way things are done*.
+
+
+## fee waivers
+
+Note: Open access fee waivers are similarly a precarious exception within a larger culture of corporate control of the mechanisms of publishing. That exception presumes that you *should* pay to make use of their infrastructure, even if in *your particular case* they might bend the rules. Every time we accept a corporate publisher's discount or fee waiver, or make use of a "read and publish" deal, or otherwise use public funds to cover the increasingly ridiculous sums charged in order to circulate the products of research, we help strengthen the argument that it's perfectly normal for corporations to control the flow of knowledge and to profit from doing so.
+
+
+![Screenshot from Mind the Gap](images/mindthegap.png)<small>mindthegap.pubpub.org/pub/gei072ab/release/2</small>
+
+Note: All of which is to make the faintly obvious point that ownership matters. As the authors of "Mind the Gap" note, the problem with our current OA model is that corporate publishers still largely control the publishing *infrastructure*. They still own the journals, for instance, and unless the ownership of the journal changes, the infrastructure remains out of our control. All that's changed is the means through which we pay to access it.
+
+
+## educational technologies
+
+Note: That’s all been a lot about publishing, but more or less everything I’ve said about corporate publishers and their control of infrastructure is doubly true of the ed tech landscape. The systems we use to "manage" (already a nervous-making word) our courses and student learning are too often technologies of extraction. They hoover up resources from our institutions and content from us and our students, and while their stated goals – creating the best possible environments for digital learning – may be admirable, their prime motive is by and large delivering value for shareholders. As a result, education is not the field they are serving, but rather the resource they are strip mining. Developing open-source, academy-owned alternatives to these platforms is a serious challenge, but one that demands to be met.
+
+
+## alternatives
+
+Note: So what alternatives do we have? Well, in the realm of publishing, we could move our journals to nonprofit publishers, but it's of course important to note that the distinction between "corporate" and "nonprofit" is a vast oversimplification. There are corporations that are actually good actors in scholarly communication space, and there are nonprofits that are really, really not. What we might need to be paying more attention to is less business model per se than 
+
+
+## alignment
+
+Note: *alignment* at the level of our basic values and goals: ensuring that our concerns about equity, about inclusiveness, about the public good are matched by those of the partners with whom we choose to work. We might, for instance, explore the models presented by
+
+
+![Open Library of the Humanities logo](images/olh.png)<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" -->
+
+![Open Book Publishers logo](images/obp.png)<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" -->
+
+Note: "platinum" or "diamond" open-access publishers such as the Open Library of the Humanities, or Open Book Publishers. These platforms are working to develop new values-aligned business models for publishing that neither involve restricting reading access to individuals or libraries that can pay, nor restricting publishing access to those who can cover author-side costs. They instead ask those institutions that can afford to contribute to their ongoing support to do so, thus keeping the platform open for everyone. They appeal to our shared values, and they rely on our investment to sustain their work -- and for that reason they remain accountable to us.
+
+
+## community-led infrastructure
+
+Note: The best such open infrastructures are community-led, rather than investor-led: their purposes are aligned with those of the communities they serve, and they are governed by those communities. And this, as Deb Chachra argues, is the key to developing the sustainable, equitable infrastructures we need for the future:
+
+
+> “Only community-led networks, whether publicly owned or non-profit cooperatives, even have the potential to incorporate broad-based accountability, long-term thinking, and an ethos of meeting needs.”
+> 
+> <span style="float:right;"><small>—Deb Chachra, <em>How Infrastructure Works</em></small></span>
+
+Note: (READ SLIDE) And this, more than anything, is what both scholarly communication and educational technology need today: broad-based accountability to scholars and fields and institutions rather than shareholders; long-term thinking and an ethos of meeting our needs rather than those of investors. Hence the call in BOAI20 for hosting open access research on open infrastructure: infrastructure that is led by us, and accountable to us.
+
+
+![Knowledge Commons logo](images/KCommons.png)
+
+Note: And this is the fundamental orientation and driving purpose of my own project, Knowledge Commons, which originated from a desire to build new avenues for more open, more public, more universally accessible scholarly communication. Knowledge Commons has its deep roots in MLA Commons, which was developed to support communication and collaboration among MLA members, a model that was extended to embrace other fields when we became Humanities Commons. We’ve recently rebranded as Knowledge Commons, in order to better represent our disciplinary inclusivity, but the core remains the same. Knowledge Commons accounts are open to any interested user regardless of institutional affiliation, professional status, or organizational membership, and those accounts are and will remain free of charge. Our goal is to provide a non-extractive, community-led and transparently governed alternative to commercial platforms. Beyond that, however, we want to encourage our users to rethink the purposes and  dynamics of knowledge creation and dissemination altogether, in ways that might allow for the development of new, open, collective, equitable processes of creating and sharing our work that recenter agency with those who are actually doing the work.
+
+
+![Screenshot of Knowledge Commons front page](images/kcommons-061624.png)
+<!-- .element height="70%" width="70%" -->
+<small>hcommons.org</small>
+
+Note: Knowledge Commons is a multi-functional network supporting collaboration and communication among more than 40,000 researchers and practitioners across the disciplines and around the world. It allows users to create profiles, join discussion groups, build Wordpress websites, and more.
+
+
+![Screenshot of repository item](images/works-deposit.png) <!-- .element height="75%" width="75%" -->
+<small>works.hcommons.org/records/qptew-z3h69</small>
+
+Note: Additionally, the Commons includes a best-in-class repository, KCWorks, which allows members to upload their work, to share that work openly with the world, and to have the digital object identifiers and other metadata attached to it that render a it permanently addressable part of the larger scholarly communication ecosystem.
+
+
+![Screenshot of MSU Commons](images/msucommons-250506.png)
+<!-- .element height="75%" width="75%" -->
+<small>commons.msu.edu</small>
+
+Note: MSU not only hosts the Commons team, but also benefits from prototyping institutional membership in the network through MSU Commons. All of the features of the Commons, including repository access, profile creation, group discussions, and the development of WordPress-based websites, are available to any member of the MSU community using your MSU login information.
+
+
+![Screenshot of about.hcommons.org](images/KCabout.png) <!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" -->
+<small>about.hcommons.org</small>
+
+Note: Knowledge Commons is built by and for scholars. It's a values-enacted project, meaning that, among other things, (1) we have put in place a community governance structure that enables both individual users and our institutional sustaining members to have a voice in the project's future, (2) we have developed network policies that emphasize inclusion and openness, and (3) we are committed to transparency in our finances, and most importantly to remaining not-for-profit in perpetuity. 
+
+
+## openness matters
+
+Note: This kind of openness -- not just of the tools but of the operating principles behind them -- matters enormously, not just to ensure that we’re living up to the values that we’ve established for our projects, but to ensure that there’s a worthwhile future for them. Cory Doctorow has gotten a lot of airtime of late for his description of the “enshittification” of the internet, which stems directly from user attention and energy being sucked out of the community and into the pockets of shareholders. 
+
+
+![Doctorow on walled gardens](images/walledgardens.png)<small>pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/</small>
+
+Note: Doctorow's argument about enshittification arose in thinking about the decline of Twitter and the damage it has caused, and he's more recently noted his resistance to the new big alternatives like Threads and Blue Sky, which remain walled gardens even as they attempt to benefit from federation. He points to the brilliance and creativity that so many people poured into Twitter, noting that “the only thing worse than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it —  and learned _nothing_.”
+
+
+## walled gardens
+
+Note: The problem with walled gardens, after all, is only partly their proprietary technologies, and only partly their ownership. It's largely their governance. It’s not just that the owners of any particular proprietary network might turn out to be racist, fascist megalomaniacs – it’s that we have no control if and when they do. Choosing open platforms means that we as users have a say in the future of the plots of ground we choose to develop. This is especially important for the kinds of work, like knowledge production, that are intended to have a public benefit. It’s incumbent on us to ensure that the gardens we plant aren't walled, that they don't just have a gate that management may one day decide to unlock to let select folks in or out. Rather, we must cultivate ground that is open from the start, open not just to our labor but to our decision-making.
+
+
+## accountability and responsibility
+
+Note: For Knowledge Commons, operating in the open means that we are accountable to our users and responsible for safeguarding the openness of their work. Together, those two ideals keep us focused on providing alternatives to the many platforms that purport to make scholarly work more accessible but in fact serve as mechanisms of corporate data capture, extracting value from creators and institutions for private rather than public gain.
+
+
+# but
+
+Note: But even as we work to become a trusted form of open infrastructure, we face our own struggles with the walled garden. And this is where we need to dig down into the dirty underside of infrastructure, which, as Chachra notes, is usually buried out of view. If we are going to mitigate the inequities created by and sustained through infrastructure, we have to get busy unearthing those systems and find ways to build new ones. And so:
+
+
+# AWS
+
+Note: We need to take a hard look at the fact that the infrastructure that Knowledge Commons and so many other open initiatives are built upon is AWS, or Amazon Web Services, part of the Greater Jeff Bezos Empire. Every dollar that we spend to host with them helps to keep that empire running. And run it does!
+
+
+![Chart of AWS revenue from 2013 to 2022](images/aws.png)<!-- .element height="75%" width="75%" --><small>statista.com/statistics/233725/development-of-amazon-web-services-revenue/</small>
+
+Note: Amazon’s revenue derived from AWS passed 80 billion-with-a-b dollars in 2022.
+
+
+![Amazon usage statistics](images/aws3.png)<!-- .element height="50%" width="50%" --><br /><small>trends.builtwith.com/hosting/Amazon</small>
+
+Note: and as of August 2023, AWS hosted 42 percent of the top 100,000 websites, and 25 percent of the top one million – ironically enough including BuiltWith, the site from which these data are made available.
+
+
+# why?
+
+Note: Why has Amazon become so powerful a force in web hosting and cloud computing? Largely because they provide not just servers but a powerful suite of tools that help folks like us keep our platform stable and secure and enable it to scale with enormous flexibility. AWS provides services that would be more than a full-time job for someone to maintain in-house, and it enables redundancy and global reach at speed. AWS also crucially soothes our institutions' risk management anxieties by moving traffic off-campus. So… it works for us, just as it works for 42,000 of the top 100,000 websites across the internet. But I’m not happy about it. It’s not just that I hate feeding more money into the Bezos empire every month, but that I know for certain that our values do not align. And every so often I have to stop and ask how much good it does for us to build pathways of escape from the extractive clutches of Elsevier and friends, only to have those pathways deliver us all into the gaping maw of Amazon?
+
+
+## ~~alternatives~~
+
+Notes: AWS has a stranglehold on web-based platforms of our size, as we’re too big for a box under the desk, too complicated for a smaller hosting service, and too small for our own data center. And if you don’t want to deal with the risks and costs involved in owning and operating the metal yourself, there just aren’t many good alternatives.
+
+
+## MSU
+
+Note: Here at MSU, like many other research universities, we have both an institutional data center operated by central IT and a high-performance computing center running under the aegis of the office of research and innovation. The latter can’t help us right now, as it’s focused pretty exclusively on computational uses and not at all on service hosting. And the former comes with a suite of restrictions and regulations in terms of access and security –
+
+
+![Screenshot from CNN: U Michigan shuts down internet connections](images/umich.png)<!-- .element height="55%" width="55%" -->
+<small>cnn.com/2023/08/29/politics/university-of-michigan-cyber-incident-offline</small>
+
+Note: – pretty understandably so, given recent attacks and exploits such as the one that caused our neighbor to the east to disconnect the entire campus from the internet on the first day of classes in fall 2023 – but nevertheless restrictions that make it impossible for us to be flexible enough with our work.
+
+
+## the cloud
+
+Note: And, in fact, central IT strongly encourages projects like ours to make use of cloud computing, given the complexity of our needs and risks we present to the campus. They've even negotiated discounts for us, and we have our pick! We can use AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google Cloud Services.
+
+
+![This slide intentionally left blank](images/blank.png)
+
+Note: I just can’t help but think that it’s a Bad Thing for academic and nonprofit services – services that are working to be open, and public, and values enacted – to be dependent upon Silicon Valley megacorps. We need real alternatives. And as with open access, any discounts or special provisions that commercial providers come up with are certain to increase our lock-in, and increase the level of resources they extract from our campuses.
+
+
+## community-led infrastructure
+
+Note: So what might it look like for the infrastructure of knowledge production and dissemination to be community-led all the way down? What might enable the Commons to leave AWS behind and instead contribute our resources to supporting a truly shared, openly governed, not-for-profit cloud service?
+
+
+![Screen shot of story about UK data center collaboration](images/uk-data-centre.png)<small>silicon.co.uk/cloud/why-data-centre-collaboration-is-key-to-success-for-uk-research-165462</small>
+
+Note: A collaborative, community operated cloud service is not impossible to imagine. King’s College London and Jisc established the first collaborative research data center in the world nine years ago to help UK institutions achieve economies of scale, to increase energy efficiency, and to reduce costs. Of course, it’s a lot easier to get all the UK institutions of higher education on board with such a centralized initiative, partly because there are fewer of them and partly because they are all centrally funded.
+
+
+![Access-ci logo](images/access-ci.png)<small>access-ci.org</small>
+
+Note: The NSF funded ACCESS-CI project points in this direction, but the process of getting access (ha ha) to this infrastructure for a project like ours isn’t 100% clear, and it’s also not clear how durable and sustainable such access will be in the face of what's happening to the NSF right now.
+
+
+![Internet 2 logo](images/internet2.png)<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" --><br />
+<small>internet2.edu</small>
+
+Note: Real shared cyberinfrastructure will require a high degree of commitment from a large number of institutions to be viable. So what if an organization like Internet2 that already has such commitment were to offer an alternative – one that was not just developed for the academic community but that would be governed by that community? What if each member institution or organization agreed to contribute access to its existing infrastructure and some portion of its annual maintenance budget to a shared, distributed, community-owned cloud computing center? Could excess capacity then be offered at reasonable prices to other nonprofit institutions or organizations or projects like mine, in a way that might draw us away from the Silicon Valley megacorps? Would our institutions, our libraries, our publishers, and our many other web-based projects find themselves with better control over their futures?
+
+
+- foster social and epistemic justice
+- empower communities of practice
+- enable community-led decision making
+
+Note:  None of this will be easy, and much of what I’ve just suggested may – at least for the moment – be a pipe dream. But if we were to be willing to press on anyway, we might find ourselves in a world in which the infrastructures of knowledge production and dissemination can help us foster rather than hinder social and epistemic justice, can empower communities of practice by centering their needs and their work to meet them, and can enable trustworthy community governance and decision-making that can secure a better future for us all.
+
+
+## thank you
+---
+<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
+
+Note: Many thanks.
Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	de630389b1	add indiana251110 Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-11-06 10:26:16 -05:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	3de8c5d07a	reposition image Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-09-29 06:04:08 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	e480af9604	reposition image Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-09-29 06:03:13 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	caf6674e9a	position image Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-09-29 05:59:56 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	4a6a63a87c	add KC logo Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-09-29 05:55:53 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	91b01ddc50	fix logo Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-09-29 05:51:43 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	b092619d40	fix background Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-09-29 05:48:31 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	d657d7ad88	add nsf250930 Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-09-29 05:46:14 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	1c1d802af8	fix link Some checks failed Tests / build (18) (push) Has been cancelled Details Tests / build (20) (push) Has been cancelled Details	2025-06-23 14:16:48 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	51d6bd647c	fix H2s	2025-06-23 14:10:38 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	db8ce841b8	add bath250625	2025-06-23 14:07:16 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	8a7cb53410	add linebreak	2025-05-06 17:50:56 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	55a2834821	add url to title slide	2025-05-06 17:49:21 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	ac552c29a4	change subtitle	2025-05-06 17:47:29 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	66e4b9c713	fix another line break	2025-05-06 17:45:04 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	01b605d703	fix line break	2025-05-06 17:42:20 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	26caaaf6ea	fix broken note	2025-05-06 17:40:38 -04:00
Kathleen Fitzpatrick	498c2d6f18	add talks250508	2025-05-06 17:36:30 -04:00