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# Leading Generously
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---
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### Tools for Transformation
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---
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<br />
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<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz@hcommons.social // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller><br />
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<small>http://presentations.kfitz.info/bath250625.html</small>
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<img width="400" src="images/lgcover.jpg" alt="Cover of Leading Generously">
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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.
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# crisis
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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.
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<img width="400" src="images/gtcover.png" alt="Cover of Generous Thinking">
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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.
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# change
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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.
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# how
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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?
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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.
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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.
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<smaller>https://unsplash.com/@edrecestansberry</smaller>
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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?
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# collective action
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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.
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# leadership
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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.
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> “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)
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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.
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# agency
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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.
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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.
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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.
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# collective
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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.
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# “like a business”
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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.
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# competitive
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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.
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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.
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# management
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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
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## “over-managed <br />and under-led”
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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.
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# cultivation
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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
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> <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>
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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.
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# organize
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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.
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<img width="400" src="images/lgcover.jpg" alt="Cover of Leading Generously">
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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.
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## Hope is a discipline.
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### *--Mariame Kaba*
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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.
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## questions
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- 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?
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- What are the key challenges you see for leaders in the current environment? How might we work together toward solutions?
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## thank you
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---
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<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz<span>@</span>hcommons.social // kfitz<span>@</span>msu.edu</smaller><br />
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Note: Many thanks.
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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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<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
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" -->
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<!-- .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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<!-- .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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
 <!-- .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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<!-- .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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
 <!-- .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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<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!
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<!-- .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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<!-- .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 –
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<!-- .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.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
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?
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
<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.
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<small>access-ci.org</small>
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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.
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<!-- .element height="85%" width="85%" --><br />
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<small>internet2.edu</small>
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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?
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- foster social and epistemic justice
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- empower communities of practice
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- enable community-led decision making
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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.
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## thank you
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---
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<smaller>Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu</smaller>
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Note: Many thanks.
|
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Reference in New Issue
Block a user