Ownership Matters
My colleagues at Mesh Research and I recently gathered for a week-long retreat -- or rather, since we're all working remotely, and some quite remotely, for an on-site -- in order to think through our purpose as a research center, to develop the principles we bring to our work, and to articulate our goals for the year ahead for our most important projects, including Humanities Commons, Pilcrow, hcommons.social, the Domains Initiative, and more. We're not a huge team, though we've grown significantly in the last two years, and we've run into some of the growing pains of a team in transition: more people to take on the heavy lifting and more opportunities for collaboration, but more potential for breakdowns in communication and for confusion along the way.
In order to develop a concrete, collective understanding of our purpose, we broke into small groups and attempted to answer three questions --
- What is it that we do as a team?
- Who is our work intended to benefit?
- What impact do we want to make on the world?
-- pulling those three answers into a single statement: "We (do X) for (Y) in order to (Z)." Each group had its own take on our activities, our publics, and our goals, but all of the statements focused on communication, collaboration, and openness. We'll be working over the weeks ahead to bring those statements together into a single purpose that all of us can feel ownership over.
That aspect of ownership matters enormously for a team that's dedicated to transformational change. As we are: behind all of the ways we think about our purpose runs the shared goal of making the academy more open, more inclusive, more just, and more connected to the publics that we serve. In order to have any hope of achieving such a transformation in the world around us, we must fully inhabit that way of being within the team. As a result, we're working toward more and better communication about and around our work, toward developing more inclusive decision-making processes, and toward a shared sense of personal and collective accountability for the ways we work together and the results we achieve.
None of this comes easily. It's far simpler just to slip back into conventional hierarchies and org charts, to point to someone else as the responsible party, and to let irritations and resentments fester. We're trying, though, to take ownership not just of the work we do but the way we do it, of the quality of our collaborations and the relationships that underwrite them.
All of this becomes especially acute as we ponder one of the common descriptors that we apply to the platforms and tools we build; we want them to be understood to be "academy owned," which we often use as a shorthand for projects and infrastructures that are not for profit, that are values enacted, and that serve the public good. "Academy owned" also has deep implications for platform governance; our projects can only serve the public good if they are accountable to that public, rather than to shareholders.
We're committed, then, as a matter of principle, to 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.
We're looking forward to sharing more about our work together as we continue. I'll hope to hear more from you about your responses, questions, concerns, and ideas as we go!
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