Governing the Resource Directory Data Commons
Even for a blog that gets a new post like once a year or less, it’s a bit awkward that I haven’t actually posted on here about the main thing I’ve been working on for the past 10 years – as I’ve mostly just left all that on Openreferral.org. And there’s a lot there. I’m proud of what we accomplished (even though it took at least three times longer to get where we are than I’d ever anticipated) but also happy to have this personal blog space be pretty much its own (low volume) thing.
That said, I figure it’s at least worth referencing here the capstone pieces of work that capture the essence of the project that has consumed more than a decade of my adult life. These materials feel to me like they’re a dissertation as part of a kind of “PhDIY.”
First and foremost, there’s “Averting Tragedy of the Resource Directory Anti-Commons,” an essay published in the Cambridge Handbook on Commons Research Innovations (2021), in which I analyzed the resource directory data dilemma through the lens of knowledge commons governance, and offered a set of institutional concepts with which communities can sustainably produce resource data as a public good.
This essay was produced through my partnership with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, where I gleaned from the great wealth of knowledge about institutional design and resource management that has been gathered there in the “Bloomington School” through which Elinor Ostrom produced her seminal work, Governing the Commons. It has been a true privilege to work through these concepts with this community, and I’m grateful to so many people there for their time and support.
After this essay was published, the Ostrom Workshop provided me with some modest funding to develop a visual vocabulary with which we’ve graphically portrayed this set of set archetypal strategies. From this, I co-designed this whitepaper, with accompanying infographics (and haiku!) to describe several complementary models for resource data production strategies. (Thanks to Ian Dutnall at Icographic for design support :))
This post on Open Referral’s blog provides a fuller unpacking of these materials and their contents.
It has been extremely gratifying intellectually, and modestly fruitful professionally, to engage in this long process of diagnosing a social dilemma, and ultimately prescribing institutional design solutions, through a combination of literature review, field research, and practical experimentation. I feel like my work in this field is now in its final stages, although I also don’t feel it would be responsible to walk away from it entirely; I will continue to consult with any parties who might benefit from engagement with these materials, which could go on for years to come.
I have one more piece of work in this vein, which is already prototyped and something I’ll get around to releasing into the world soon: a participatory guidebook for collaborative design of these institutional strategies, to help stakeholders and practitioners apply these ideas in their own local context. Stay tuned for more on that.