Archives
May 14, 2020
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 that value, including our successes, our failures, and the hard-won lessons that occur in between. … Continue reading Making Community Spaces Safer: On Hiring and Transparency
April 27, 2020
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 intensive evaluations of both its organizational model and its technical approaches to distributed digital preservation. … Continue reading MetaArchive is Collaboratively Charting a New Pathway Forward for Distributed Digital Preservation
April 27, 2020
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. We build networks of players across numerous boundaries, helping them to align their work to … Continue reading Educopia Research Energizes Communities to Work Together for Mutual Benefit and Maximum Impact
April 27, 2020
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 broadening energy and capacity.
April 27, 2020
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 technical concerns with the broader field of born-digital archiving and the institutional and workflow needs … Continue reading BitCurator Consortium is Fusing Technical Concerns with Broader Field of Born-Digital Archiving
April 27, 2020
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 facilitated community cultivation sessions in which members would make key decisions regarding the form, function, … Continue reading Building Community and Capacity in the Software Preservation Network
April 17, 2020
Educopia Institute Annual Report 2019
In 2019, we joined forces with more than fifteen emerging and established collaborative efforts, providing each with specialized administrative, governance, and facilitation tools designed to harness the energy and resources of many institutions in a united direction. It was a powerful and resounding “YES” year—one in which we witnessed the impact of our work at the … Continue reading Educopia Institute Annual Report 2019
January 30, 2020
Carolina Digital Library Network
This pilot project is funded by a grant from IMLS to enable small to mid-sized academic libraries in North and South Carolina to explore the possibilities of new digital scholarship services for their researchers. Technological changes over the past three decades have radically changed the digital scholarship services which libraries can provide to their clientele. … Continue reading Carolina Digital Library Network
April 15, 2019
Collaboratively Maintaining Scholarship: Addressing Socio-Technical Scholarly Communications Challenges
In this talk, I plan to encourage you all to think and plan rigorously for the formation of the Michigan Digital Preservation Network by learning from the experiences of the many, many other communities that have formed both within and beyond the library, archives, and museum communities. I’ll provide all of you with a new … Continue reading Collaboratively Maintaining Scholarship: Addressing Socio-Technical Scholarly Communications Challenges
April 8, 2019
Towards Coherence through Collective Action: Laying the Foundation for Sustainable, Open Infrastructure
Three coordinated initiatives to talk about: Invest In Open Infrastructure (IOI) Open Platform Initiative Mapping Scholarly Infrastructure Census Outline for the conversation: Framing: Mission and Vision Overview of the Initiatives The Niche For Action Open Questions, and Conversation Direction and Next Steps
March 15, 2019
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 the Educopia Institute helped MetaArchive Cooperative to formalize as a membership community and service in … Continue reading Community Transition
February 11, 2019
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 may sap energy needed elsewhere or stymie playful innovation. We’ve found that strategic planning is … Continue reading Community Acceleration
February 8, 2019
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 at Educopia have been actively grappling with the recently reported ALA Midwinter 2019 Code of … Continue reading Making Community Spaces Safer…
January 22, 2019
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 between focusing on continued internal development while simultaneously expanding their external networks of support.
December 19, 2018
The Maintainers (subcontract)
Many groups and individuals today celebrate “innovation.” The notion is influential not only in engineering and business, but also in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. For example, “innovation” has become a staple of analysis in popular histories – such as Walter Isaacson’s recent book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks … Continue reading The Maintainers (subcontract)
December 17, 2018
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 University of Texas at Austin, were awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services National … Continue reading Grassroots Formation
November 7, 2018
Community Cultivation, Revisited
I actually tried to stand in the way of Educopia’s founding! I’m the first to admit it. A dozen years ago, I was the naysayer. I really didn’t think we could sustain a nonprofit organization centered on the science of community and collaboration. I didn’t lack conviction that our field needed a more rigorous, structured … Continue reading Community Cultivation, Revisited
November 7, 2018
Community Cultivation – A Field Guide (November 7 Release)
Issued by the Educopia Institute in November 2018, this publication provides a powerful lens that can provide both emerging and established communities with ways to understand, evaluate, and plan their own growth, change, and maturation. The Field Guide is designed for use by directors, managers, facilitators, governance bodies, officers, and staff members. It provides mechanisms … Continue reading Community Cultivation – A Field Guide (November 7 Release)
May 14, 2018
Crossing Borders, Spanning Boundaries: How Today’s Libraries (and Librarians!) Cultivate Open Knowledge
Today’s world is characterized by its fast pace of change, new forms of connectivity, and technology-based market shifts. The channels of communication have shifted radically over the last few decades, and it’s impacting both what libraries can do and what libraries can become. I’m going to ask you all to think with me for the … Continue reading Crossing Borders, Spanning Boundaries: How Today’s Libraries (and Librarians!) Cultivate Open Knowledge
March 2, 2018
Spanning Boundaries, Transforming Fields
From the NFAIS website: “In recent years, dramatic changes in scholarly publishing have altered how researchers consume, exchange, interact with, and disseminate scholarly communications.” The growth and breadth of open science ideologies and policies have spawned movements that give rise to: private foundations that are mandating more open and collaborative research; innovative new technologies and … Continue reading Spanning Boundaries, Transforming Fields