July 15, 2020
Making Community Spaces Safer: On Being Community-Driven
By Jess Farrell, Katherine Skinner, Hannah Ballard, and Caitlin Perry on behalf of the Educopia teamOver the course of this year (2020), members of the Educopia staff will be contributing blog posts to the “Making Community Spaces Safer” series. Each post will explore one of our organizational values and describe our efforts to live into that value, including our successes, our failures, and the hard-won lessons that occur in between. We will announce new posts on the Educopia website and on Twitter.
At Educopia, we believe that communities should be member-owned and controlled, with the power to make their own strategic, operational, and financial decisions. Across our entire portfolio of work—from a grant cohort to an Educopia-hosted community—we empower our members and partners to take collective action to solve system-wide problems.
Our facilitation and assessment techniques intentionally center the needs of community members. We strive to create spaces—both physical and virtual—that encourage members to drive the conversation and set the agenda, while simultaneously connecting them with resources, tools, and external groups that help amplify and increase their impact.
Making Community Spaces Safer: On Being Community-Driven
Over the course of this year (2020), members of the Educopia staff will be contributing blog posts to the “Making Community Spaces Safer” series. Each post will explore one of our organizational values and describe our efforts to live into ... Read More
Educopia Releases “OSSArcFlow Guide to Documenting Born-Digital Archival Workflows” and Three Video Learning Modules
Educopia Institute is delighted to announce the release of the OSSArcFlow Guide to Documenting Born-Digital Archival Workflows. The Guide aims to make the daunting task of selecting, implementing, and refining born-digital archiving workflows more achievable. It was authored by Alexandra ... Read More
Black Lives Matter: Educopia Institute’s Response to Ongoing Racial Violence
Educopia Institute declares our unequivocal opposition to the racial violence that shapes the lives of Black people and our unwavering support for protests against police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, surveillance, and terror. We uphold our commitment to creating community spaces ... Read More
Making Community Spaces Safer: On Hiring and Transparency
Over the course of this year (2020), members of the Educopia staff will be contributing blog posts to the “Making Community Spaces Safer” series. Each post will explore one of our organizational values and describe our efforts to live into ... Read More
MetaArchive is Collaboratively Charting a New Pathway Forward for Distributed Digital Preservation
When Community Cultivation—A Field Guide was published in late 2018, the MetaArchive Cooperative figured prominently as an example of a community entering the Transition Lifecycle Stage of maturation. Indeed, since early 2019 the MetaArchive community has undertaken a series of ... Read More
Educopia Research Energizes Communities to Work Together for Mutual Benefit and Maximum Impact
Educopia Research serves as a collaborative hub that energizes communities of players to work together for mutual benefit and maximum impact. Our research activities are designed to support our strong belief that system-wide change can only accomplished with system-wide leadership ... Read More
Broadening Energy and Opportunities in the Library Publishing Coalition
The Acceleration Lifecycle Stage is punctuated by rapid increases in a community's reach, activities, and impact. For the Library Publishing Coalition, opportunities have proliferated across committees, events, and research projects, all of which expanded in 2019 to encompass the community's ... Read More
BitCurator Consortium is Fusing Technical Concerns with Broader Field of Born-Digital Archiving
The BitCurator Consortium initially formed in 2014 around an Open Source Software environment that supports the acquisition and initial curation of born-digital collections in libraries, archives, and museums. It has grown into a burgeoning community of practice that fuses these ... Read More
Building Community and Capacity in the Software Preservation Network
In January 2019, the Software Preservation Network (SPN) launched a two-year seed funded effort to secure SPN as a sustainable, community-owned organization. As part of this process, institutions were asked to invest—not just financially, but also in a series of ... Read More
Making Community Spaces Safer: Articulating and Living Our Values
Last February, we published a post on this blog titled “Making Community Spaces Safer.” It was both a response to an incident that occurred at the 2019 ALA Midwinter conference and an articulation of something we had been pondering for ... Read More
Educopia partners with Curtin University-led alliance to increase the impact of university-based research
A new alliance of researchers led by Curtin University in partnership with Educopia Institute will work together to improve the way research is shared, charting new pathways for the future of universities around the world. Fresh strategies to reform the ... Read More
Next Generation Library Publishing partnership awarded $2.2M from Arcadia to improve scholarly publishing infrastructures
Educopia Institute is pleased to announce an award in the amount of $2,200,000 from Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin—in support of the “Next Generation Library Publishing” project. Through this project, Educopia and its partner institutions—California Digital ... Read More
Why Are So Many Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Providers Running a Red Queen’s Race?
A few weeks ago, we at Educopia published the first project deliverable for the “Mapping Scholarly Communication Infrastructure” project, which we’re working on with Middlebury College and TrueBearing Consulting. The deliverable is a report and a set of data visualizations ... Read More
Educopia and LPC awarded IMLS Grant to study journal publishing workflows
We are very excited to report that Educopia Institute, the Library Publishing Coalition, and twelve partner libraries (Atlanta University Center, California Digital Library, Claremont Colleges, Columbia University, Illinois Wesleyan University, Pacific University, University of Alberta, University of Michigan, University of ... Read More
Educopia Releases “Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape – 2019 Census” Report and Data Visualizations
We are pleased to announce a new report released by Educopia Publications: “Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape - 2019 Census.” The paper, authored by Katherine Skinner (Educopia) and edited by David Lewis, Mike Roy, and Melanie Schlosser, is the product ... Read More
Community Transition
Digital preservation is, by definition, a long-term commitment. Libraries, archives, and museums engaging in this crucial work must actively plan to maintain digital assets through decades, centuries, and millennia. As such, these organizations must both anticipate and welcome change. When ... Read More
Community Acceleration
The question of when to tackle formal strategic planning is a tricky one for any community. Strategic plans can be powerful instruments for communities that are ready for them, but at some stages of community development, a labor-intensive planning process ... Read More
Making Community Spaces Safer…
We deserve a better organization. We deserve a better profession. What happened to me and what happens to so many others cannot be allowed to continue. - April Hathcock “ALAMW: What Happened, and What Should Happen Next” All of us ... Read More
Community Validation
After a community has formed and coalesced around a central set of ideas, the next step on the path to maturity is to test the community's validity. In this crucial "validation" stage, communities often need to strike a careful balance ... Read More
Grassroots Formation
In 2014, my colleague Zach Vowell and I proposed a consortial model for long-term access to software and software-dependent data - we called it the “Software Preservation Network” (SPN). A year later, our institutions, California Polytechnic State University and the ... Read More
