Tag: governance

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Abundance Thinking

Last week I was lucky enough to spend five days in North Carolina at the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded initiative that brings teams together on a retreat style meeting to work on specific projects. More on that, and the work of our team, at a later date but one thing that came out of our work really struck me. When we talk about the web and the internet, particularly in the context of scholarly publishing we talk about how the shift from an environment of scarcity limited by the physical restrictions of the print world to a world of abundance. Often we focus on how thinking shaped in that old world is still limiting us today, often invoking that deity of disruption, Clayton Christenson in the process. So far so obvious.

What struck me as we prepared for our final presentations was that these narratives of scarcity don’t just limit us in the world of publication. I am lucky enough to have been to quite a few meetings where great people are sequestered together to think and discuss. These meetings always generate new ideas, exciting projects and life changing insights that somehow dissolve away as we return to our regular lives. The abundance of these focussed meetings, abundance of time, abundance of expertise, abundance of the attention of smart people gives way to the scarcity of our day to day existence. The development of these new ideas falters as it has to compete with scarce time of individuals. When time can be found it is asynchronous, and patchy. We try to make time but we never seem to be able to find the right kind of time.

Many of us reflected that it was a shame we couldn’t always work like this, focussed periods bringing groups together to do the work. But it struck me that, just as the web provides a platform, an infrastructure, that makes publication cheap, that the Mellon Foundation through the SCI Program has also provided an infrastructure that creates an abundance of time and attention. The marginal cost of each project is minimal compared to investment in the program. It is the program that makes it possible. Could the same be true of that archetypal form of scarcity in research, the grant? Could we imagine infrastructures that make the actual doing of research relatively cheap? Is that possible in a world of expensive reagents and equipment? Are the limitations that we see as so self evident real, or are they imposed by our lack of imagination?

And yet there’s also a dark side to this. It is a privilege to attend these meetings and work with these people. And I mean “privilege” with all the loaded and ambivalent connotations it has today. The language of abundance is the language of the “disruptors” of Silicon Valley, a language of techno-utopianism where, with the money you made from your dating app for Bay Area dogs you can now turn your attention to “solving someone else’s problem” with a new app or a new gadget. It can be well-meaning but it is limited. The true challenge is create the opportunities for abundance where it wasn’t before, supporting the creation of new infrastructure and platforms that truly create abundance for those who will most appreciate it. Tim O’Reilly‘s “X as a Platform” agenda pointed in this direction but in a limited context. The web is not (yet) that platform as the rumbling debate over the Wikipedia Zero program shows.

Each time I look at the question of infrastructures I feel the need to go a layer deeper, that the real solution lies underneath the problems of the layer I’m looking at. At some level this is true, but its also an illusion. The answers to questions of biology do not lie in chemistry, nor do the answers of chemistry do not lie in physics. The answers lie in finding the right level of abstraction and model building (which might be in biology, chemisty, physics or literature depending on the problem). Principles and governance systems are one form of abstraction that might help but its not the whole answer. It seems like if we could re-frame the way we think about these problems, and find new abstractions, new places to stand and see the issues we might be able to break through at least some of those that seem intractable today. How might we recognise the unexpected places where it is possible to create abundance?

If only I could find the time to think that through…

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What exactly is infrastructure? Seeing the leopard’s spots

This is a photo of a black leopard from the Ou...
Black leopard from Out of Africa Wildlife Park in Arizona (Wikipedia)

Cite as: What exactly is infrastructure? Seeing the leopard’s spots. Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon. figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1520432

We ducked a fundamental question raised by our proposal for infrastructure principles: “what exactly counts as infrastructure?” This question matters. If our claim is that infrastructures should operate according to a set of principles, we need to be able to identify the thing of which we speak. Call the leopard, a leopard. Of course this is not a straightforward question and part of the reason for leaving it in untouched in the introductory post. We believe that any definition must entail a much broader discussion from the community. But we wanted to kick this off with a discussion of an important part of the infrastructure puzzle that we think is often missed.

In our conversations with scholars and others in the research ecosystem, people frequently speak of “infrastructures” when what they mean are services on top of deeper infrastructures. Or indeed infrastructures that sit on deeper infrastructures. Most people think of the web as an essential piece of infrastructures and it is the platform that makes much of what we are talking about possible. But the web is built on deeper layers of infrastructure: the internet, MAC addresses, IP, and TCP/IP. Things that many readers will never even have heard of because they have disappeared from view. . Similarly in academia, a researcher will point to “CERN” or “Genbank” or “Pubmed” or “The Perseus Project” when asked about critical infrastructure. The Physicists at CERN have long since taken the plumbing, electricity, roads, tracks, airports etc. that make CERN possible for granted.

All these examples involve services operating a layer above ones we have been considering. Infrastructure is not commonly seen. That lower level infrastructure has become invisible just as the underlying network protocols, which make Genbank, PubMed and the Perseus Project possible have also long since become invisible and taken for granted. To put a prosaic point on it, what is not commonly seen is also not commonly noticed. And that makes it even more important for us to focus on getting these deeper layers of infrastructure right.

If doing research entails the search for new discoveries, those involved are more inclined to focus on what is different about their research. Every sub-community within academia tends to think at a level of abstraction that is typically one layer above the truly essential – and shared – infrastructure. We hear physicists, chemists, biologists, humanists at meetings and conferences assume that the problems that they are trying to solve in online scholarly communication are specific to their particular discipline. They say “we need to uniquely identify antibodies” or “we need storage for astronomy data” or “we need to know which journals are open access” or “how many times has this article been downloaded”. Then they build the thing that they (think they) need.

This then leads to another layer of invisibility – the infrastructures that we were concerned with in the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure are about what is the same across disciplines, not what is different. It is precisely the fact that these common needs are boring that means they starts to disappear from view, in some cases before they even get built. For us it is almost a law: people tend to identify infrastructure one layer too high. We want to refocus attention on the layer below, the one that is disappearing from view. It turns out that a black leopard’s spots can be seen – once they’re viewed under infrared light.

So where does that leave us? What we hear in these conversations across disciplines are not the things that are different (ie., what is special about antibodies or astronomy data or journal classifications or usage counts) but what is in common across all of these problems. This class of common problems need shared solutions. “We need identifiers” and “we need storage” and ”we need to assign metadata” and “we need to record relationships”. These infrastructures are ones that will allow us to identify objects of interest (ex: identify new kinds of research objects), store resources where more specialised storage doesn’t already exists (ex: validate a data analysis pipeline), and record metadata and relationships between resources, objects and ideas (ex: describing the relationships between funders and datasets). For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals provides identifiers for Open Access journals, claims about such journals, and relationships with other resources and objects (such as article level metadata, like Crossref DOIs and Creative Commons license URLs).

But what has generally happened in the past  is that each group re-invents the wheel for its own particular niche. Specialist resources build a whole stack of tools rather than layering on the one specific piece that they need on an existing set of infrastructures. There is an important counter-example: the ability to easily cross-reference articles and datasets as well as connect these to the people who created them. This is made possible by Crossref and Datacite DOIs with ORCID IDs. ORCID is an infrastructure that provides identifiers for people as well as metadata and claims about relationships between people and other resources (e.g., articles, funders, and institutions) which are in turn described by identifiers from other infrastructures (Crossref, FundRef, ISNI). The need to identify objects is something that we have recognised as common across the research enterprise. And the common infrastructures that have been built are amongst the most powerful that we have at our disposal. But yet most of us don’t even notice that we are using them.

Infrastructures for identification, storage, metadata and relationships enable scholarship. We need to extend the base platform of identifiers into those new spaces, beyond identification to include storage and references. If we can harness the benefits on the same scale that have arisen from the provision of identifiers like Crossref DOIs then the building of new services that are specific to given disciplines will become so much easier.  In particular, we need to address the gap in providing a way to describe relationships between objects and resources in general. This base layer may be “boring” and it may be invisible to the view of most researchers. But that’s the way it should be. That’s what makes it infrastructure.

It isn’t what is immediately visible on the surface that makes a leopard a leopard, otherwise the black leopard wouldn’t be, it is what is buried beneath.

[pdf-lite]

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.everyone or .science? Or both? Reflections on Martha Lane Fox’s Dimbleby Lecture

English: Martha Lane Fox
Martha Lane Fox (Photo: The Cabinet Office License: OGL v1.0)

On March 30 the BBC broadcast a 40 minute talk from Martha Lane Fox. The Richard Dimbleby Lecture is an odd beast, a peculiarly British, indeed a peculiarly BBC-ish institution. It is very much an establishment platform, celebrating a legendary broadcaster and ring marshaled by his sons, a family that as our speaker dryly noted are “an entrenched monopoly” in British broadcasting.

 

Indeed one might argue Baroness Lane Fox, adviser to two prime ministers, member of the House of Lords, is a part of that establishment. At the same time the lecture is a platform for provocation, for demanding thinking. And that platform was used very effectively to deliver a brilliant example of another very British thing, the politely impassioned call for radical (yet moderate) action.

The speech calls for the creation of a new public institution. Dubbed “Dot Everyone” such an institution would educate, engage and inform all citizens on the internet. It would act as a resource, it would show what might be possible, it would enhance diversity and it would explore and implement a more values based approach to how we operate on the web. I have quibbles, things that got skipped over or might merit more examination, but really these are more the product of the space available than the vision itself.

At the centre of that vision is a call for a new civics supported by new institutions. This chimes with me as it addresses many of the same issues that have motivated my recent thinking in the research space. The Principles for Open Infrastructures I wrote with Geoff Bilder and Jennifer Lin, could as easily have been called Principles for Institutions – we were motivated to work on them because we believe in a need for new institutions. For many years I have started talks on research assessment by posing the question “what are your values” – a question implicit in the speech as it probes the ethics of how the internet is built in practice.

I was excited by this speech. And inspired.

And yet.

One element did not sit easily with me. I emphasized the British dimension at the top of this piece. Martha Lane Fox’s pitch was to “make Britain brilliant at the internet” and was focused on the advantages for this country. By contrast the first of the Principles for Open Infrastructures is that these new institutions must transcend geography and have international reach. Is this a contradiction? Are we pushing in different directions? More particularly is there a tension between an institution “for everyone” and one having a national focus?

The speech answers this in part and I think the section is worth quoting in full:

We should be ambitious about this. We could be world leading in our thinking.

In this 800th year anniversary of Magna Carta, the document widely upheld as one of the first examples of the rule of law, why don’t we establish frameworks to help navigate the online world?

Frameworks that would become as respected and global as that rule of law, as widely adopted as the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy.

Clearly this new institution, “our new institution” as it is referred to throughout, has international ambitions. But I don’t imagine I am the only person to find something almost neo-colonial in these words. Britain has sought to export its values to the world many times, and been remarkably successful. But in the past this has also been paternalistic. The very best possible assessment of what was in many cases well intentioned imposition of British values is equivocal. Lane Fox sets up the “good” values of Britain against the lack of values that inhere in the big commercial players building the web. What is it today that make “our” values those that should inspire or lead any more than the, now questionable, values of the past?

To be clear I am absolutely not suggesting that these are issues that have escaped the speaker’s notice. Martha Lane Fox is an outstanding and effective campaigner for diversity and inclusion and the section of her talk that I have taken out of context above comes after a substantial section on the value of inclusion, focused largely on gender but with a recognition that the same issues limit the inclusion and contribution of many people on the basis of many types of difference. In truth, her views on the how and the why of what we need to change, on what those values are, are highly aligned with mine.

But that’s kind of the point.

If we are to have a new civics, enabled by the communications infrastructure that the web provides, then diversity will lie at the heart of this. Whether you take the utilitarian (not to say neo-liberal) view that inclusion and diversity drives the creation of greater value, or see it as simply a matter of justice, diversity and inclusion and acceptance of difference are central.

But at the same time the agile and flat governance models that Lane Fox advocates, to be fair in passing, for our new institution arise out the concept that “rough consensus and running code” are the way to get things done. But whose consensus matters? And how does the structural imbalance of the digital divide affect whose code gets to run first? This seems to me the central question to be resolved by this new civics. How do we use the power of web to connect communities of interest, and to provide infrastructures that allow them to act, to have agency, while at the same time ensuring inclusion.

At its best the web is an infrastructure for communities, a platform that allows people to come together. Yet communities define themselves by what they have in common, and by definition exclude those who do not share those characteristics. My implicit claim above that our institutional principles are somehow more inclusive or more general than Lane Fox’s is obviously bogus. Our focus is on the research community, and therefore just as exclusive as a focus on a single nation. There are no easy answers here.

The best answer I can give is that we need multiple competing centres. “Dot Everyone” is a call for a national institution, a national resurgence even. Alone it might be successful, but even better is for it to have competition. Martha Lane Fox’s call is ambitious, but I think it’s not enough. We need many of these institutions, all expressing their values, seeking common ground to build a conversation between communities, domains, geographies and nations.

The tension between facilitating community and diversity can be a productive one if two conditions are satisfied. First that all can find communities where they belong, and secondly that the conversation between communities is just and fair. This is a huge challenge, it will require nothing less than a new global infrastructure for an inclusive politics.

It is also probably a pipe dream, another well meaning but ultimately incomplete effort to improve the world. But if the lesson we learn from colonialism is that we should never try, then we should give up now. Better is to do our best, while constantly questioning our assumptions and testing them against other’s perspectives.

As it happens, we have some new systems that are pretty good for doing that. We just need to figure out how best to use them. And that, at core, was Martha Lane Fox’s point.