Think of science like an incurable intellectual disease (Part 3)

GO TO PART ONE if you haven’t read it yet…

Part 3: Platforms and Norms: There’s a commons in your science future

Science is broken: Who’s got the duct tape and WD40?

So, here we are, Act III.

Act I was all about how personal science is. Scientists are individually infected with their own science quest. Act II was about how social science is. Why else would they take a hundred-thousand airline flights a year to gather in workshops and solve problems together (well, apart from the miles)? Act III needs to be about culture and technology. But not so much about the content of culture and the features of technology. Rather, about the doing of culture and the uses of technology.

Yes, the sciences are broken. Some part of this rupture was built-in (Merton, who outlined scientific norms in the 1940s, also outlined the integral tensions that disrupted these—i.e., the Matthew effect). But much of the damage has come from the displacement of the academy within society that has warped the culture of science.

Yochai Benker generally describes the tensions of this warping as “three dimensions of power”. These power dimensions (hierarchy, intellectual property, and the neoliberal need to always show more returns) work against science as a mode of peer production that self-commits to shared norms. Science needs to find alternative means to fight hierarchy, share its goods, and own its own returns.

The sciences are stuck and fractured, in need of both WD40 and duct tape—culture change and technological support. Scientists need to operationalize open sharing and collective learning. For this, they must discard the institutions that enable the above dimensions of power in favor of new communities and clubs (in Neylon’s sense of the term) that can house cultures of commoning, and activate global peer production.

At a recent workshop where the topic of the “scholarly commons” was the theme, I was again impressed by descriptions of how these dimensions of power are locally applied in academic institutions across the planet. The workshop was designed to arrive at a consensus on a universal statement, a short list of principles, such as a restatement of Merton’s norms. Instead, the organizers were reminded that these so-called universal principles could only be accepted as suggestions. These would need to be locally reexamined, reconfigured, reauthorized and only then applied as needed against the institutional cultural situation at hand. Here is another look at the dynamics of that workshop. 

Earlier in the Summer, I attended a breakout session at the ESIP Meeting where a long discussion about building an Earth science data commons concluded that ESIP was either already one, or ready to be one. A second determination was that ESIP was about the right size for this task, that multiple data commons could be built across the academy on the model of ESIP, but with their own sui generis culture and logic of practice, geared to local conditions and particular science needs.

The real question is not how to create the scholarly commons, but rather how to rescue (or re-place) current academic institutions using commons-based economies, and using the various norms of commoning as a baseline for the shared cultural practice of open science. The real task is then how to help move this process forward.

If commoning is the WD40 to release science for the sclerotic hold of its 19th Century institutions (Side note: Michelle Brook is assembling a list of learned societies in the UK. This list is already has  more than 800 entries), technology is the duct tape needed to help these hundreds and thousands of commons communities work in concert across the globe. The internet—which science needs to find out how to use as a lateral-learning tool at least as well as the global skateboarding community already does—holds the future of science. Shared community platforms, such as Trellis, now under construction at the AAAS, or the Open Science Framework, from the Center for Open Science can help solve the problems created by a thousand science communities supporting hundreds of thousands of clusters (collectives) needing to discover each others’ work in real time.

For commoning to gain traction in the academy, we must first explore this as a generative practice for open science. But as each commons spins up its own variety of commoning, we need to avoid prescribing universal norms for them. Instead, the most productive next step might be to unleash a more profound understanding of the circumstances of scholarly commoning by building a set of design patterns that will be localized and applied as needed to yank local institutions away from hierarchy, intellectual property wrongs, and the pull of the margins that preempt ethical decisions and norms.

Next summer, the ESIP Federation is hoping to host a two-day charrette at its Summer Meeting in Bloomington Indiana to begin the process of building scholarly commons patterns. A pattern lexicon for scholarly commoning will potentially help hundreds of science communities self-govern their own open resources and commoners.

Lessons learned (Parts 1-3):

1. Science is intensely personal. Scientists are already engaged in their own struggle with the unknowns they hope to defeat. Their intellectual disease is fortunately incurable.
2. Science is already social. Just in the US, several thousand workshops a year evidence the scientific need/desire to build collective knowledge.
3. Science is cultural. Self-governed science communities can use intentional cultural practices to help scientists prepare to work together in virtual organizations with shared norms and resources.
4. Community opens up arenas for online collaboration. Instant collectives, such as ESIP clusters, can replace expensive workshops and enable scientists to share knowledge and solve problems.
5. These communities need to consider themselves as commons to replace institutions that have been twisted by the three dimensions of power (hierarchy, intellectual property, and neoliberal economics).
6. Each commons needs to work locally, attuned to its local situation within science domains and academic institutions.
7. The academy needs to harness the internet and technology platforms to knit together localized science/data commons into a global web of open shared resources and collective intelligence.