Community Calls
Our research team is pleased to introduce the “Community Call” series on the topic of the “commons of science and technology,” that is, the collective and collaborative dynamics of knowledge production around community-oriented science and technology projects. This series is dedicated to the challenges, benefits, lessons learned, and uncharted possibilities of the commons as a governance framework, but also organizational principle, as more attention is given to “open technology” projects worldwide.
The series is open to public participation: everyone is welcome to join!
Community Calls (2025-2026)
| Title / Speaker(s) | Description | Date/Time | Video Link |
| Resilience and Permanence: How Appropedia is Building Knowledge Commons for Planetary Impact Emilio Velis (Appropedia) |
This community call will discuss the experience of Appropedia, an open-access sustainability wiki. We will explore how publishing open documentation for sustainability projects can facilitate resilient collaboration between community organizations, open technologists, and socio-environmental researchers. We will respond to the following questions: How did we build a commons of sustainability projects using Appropedia? How do science and environmental justice practitioners use open-access documentation to address environmental problems? How can we prepare accessible publications that not only inform but inspire positive environmental action over time? How can we foster actionable and relevant socio-ecological knowledge with Appropedia in face of widespread climate disasters? And, how can we ensure that documentation remains open and accessible over time? | February 28, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| Commoning and Collaboration on Gala: From Open Educational Resources to Open Ecosystems in Ecology Rebecca Hardin and Ed Waisanen (U. of Michigan) |
This community call explores content creation for curricular tools on the open source platform www.learngala.com. The discussion relates how original author communities with common norms, standards and needs enabled modules to emerge through iterative processes, exemplifying the CARE. principles and commoning for curation of open educational resources. The call then considers how wider circles of collaborators found, forked, and enhanced these modules, illustrating FAIR. principles and collaboration for open learning ecosystems as they emerge in practice. | March 28, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| A Fossil-Free Internet and Other Solarpunk Futures Michelle Thorne (Green Web Foundation) |
The immense possibilities of today’s internet services, data centres, artificial intelligence and rendered computer graphics have been made possible by a large supply of cheap energy sources: fossil fuels. The promises of yet another generation of artificial intelligence and the rise of the metaverse and cryptocurrencies and more are unthinkable without the endless extraction and flow of fossil energy. Many are already talking about ‘data warming‘ as one of the strongly growing drivers of global warming. This talk invites participants to reflect upon the possibilities of a fossil-free internet based on ecological ethics and regenerative principles and seek inspiration from the solar punk movement. | April 25, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| What does flourishing look like for scientific communities and discoveries? Commons, Salons and Flourishing Studies Ryan McGranaghan (NASA-JPL) |
What does flourishing look like for scientists, science communities, and society at large? Flourishing certainly involves pushing the frontiers of scientific discovery—frontiers that increasingly lie at the intersections of disciplines, communities, and worldviews. Meeting these challenges demands not only new technical approaches from data science and open science, but also new modes of collaboration, stewardship, and care. These are fundamentally socio-technical questions, and they require us to rethink how we build science together. In this talk, I’ll share how we are attempting to build knowledge commons within NASA science, through efforts in knowledge representation and community interactions, altogether in an ethos of open science. So, it will, in part, be about the nuanced, messy, ongoing work of building knowledge infrastructure and knowledge communities. But the commons is more than infrastructure—it also prompts a deeper, collective question: What are we to and for each other, as scientists for, co-creators of, and participants in society? In the second half of the talk, I’ll invite us to explore the emerging terrain of flourishing as a dimension of science. We will explore the landscape of what flourishing looks like in the realm of scholarship and spark conversation towards a (new) field of flourishing studies. | June 06, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| Mapping Water Care Initiatives in the Americas Lisa Blackmore (UVA); Alejandro Ponce de Leon (UC Berkeley) |
What are the affordances of editorial projects like the Hydrocommons Map in promoting the emergence of a knowledge commons of practices that support the care and wellbeing of bodies of water? Our talk will present a series of open access research and mapping processes that we’ve been engaged in with different water care initiatives and communities in Latin America. We’ll explore how art and humanities research intersects with a rising tide of water protection movements emerging across the world and hemispherically, where our work is focused. Focusing on the work of the arts-led research platform entre—ríos, we will delve into values and practices that recognize our more-than-human connection through water and modes of cooperation that foster ecosocial wellbeing. Through a discussion of collaborative editorial and curatorial projects developed over recent years, this session opens a space to think together about how art-science-community collaborations, mapping processes based on fieldwork and remote work, and art and storytelling can support emergent and resilient practices that care for common waters. | June 27, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| Big Science is in crisis. Can Small Science lend a hand? Sebastián Ureta (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) |
Depending on massive funding (usually coming from the State), large teams of highly specialized researchers and substantial arrays of up-to-date equipment and infrastructures, the “Big Science” model became the leading way of conducting scientific research in the postwar period, especially in industrialized countries. Recent global developments, such as the massive termination of research grants in the U.S. or the redirection of public funding from basic research to defense in Europe, are causing its most radical upheaval to date. Given this scenario, this presentation will speculate whether “smaller” kinds of science could help keep critical research processes going, especially regarding urgent topics such as the socioenvironmental crisis. By smaller kinds of science, we refer to technoscientific practices that operate with tight budgets, involve few (if any) specialized researchers, and have strictly limited access to equipment and infrastructures. To avoid romanticizing smaller kinds of science, the presentation will explore these issues by focusing on citizen-led environmental research in Chile. Presenting its strengths and weaknesses, the aim is to examine whether the crisis in Big Science could be seen as an opportunity to explore more plural modes of science governance, maybe less spectacular but more attuned to carry out research in our fragmented and unequal worlds. | July, 25, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| Mitigating the environmental impacts of AI: From lab environment metrics to data center pollution Tamara Kneese (Data and Society) |
Measuring the carbon emissions, energy, or water used by an AI model in a lab does not capture the lived effects of data pollution on bodies and environments. Through my interviews with tech workers across the industry and community activists on the ground, I am trying to reconcile these different perspectives. How can the people who are designing, building, deploying, and regulating digital technologies really see the visceral effects of their decision-making? How can they draw connections between the work they are doing on a day-to-day basis, their mundane workflows, and the devastating long-term environmental and health impacts of these technologies across the lifecycle? | August, 29, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| Equality of Access Requires Equity in Design: Rethinking Open Science Infrastructures Louise Bezuidenhout (Leiden University) |
The 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science underscored the global commitment to Open Science. The declaration defines Open Science through the values of inclusivity and equity and the principle of sustainability. This commitment to equity hinges on a key implicit assumption, namely that diverse stakeholders around the world will be able to add value to their lives by accessing and applying the resources made available through Open Science infrastructures and practices. Despite these strong commitments, engagement around what equitable access to open resources looks like in practice is low. Lessons from development studies and ICT4D illustrate the limitations of framings such as online/offline, or the “digital divide”. Being able to meaningfully utilise available online resources is influenced by a range of other technical, infrastructural, cultural and geo-political factors. In this talk I will present our research on infrastructural equity. Using computational methods we have tested access to open infrastructures from different locations around the world. Our data illustrates a highly heterogeneous landscape of accessibility of open resources that links to the design decisions inherent in these infrastructures and the contexts in which they are trying to be used. I would like these data to initiate a community discussion on how to integrate equity-driven thinking into the design, deployment and support of open science infrastructures. How can we ensure that infrastructures are not geo-blocked to specific countries? How can we support use of infrastructures in low-bandwidth settings? How can we enable engagement with infrastructures through diverse ICT devices? In short, how can we ensure that the equal access to open resources is supported by equity in infrastructure design? | September, 26, 2025, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| AI and Truths Seen Too Late Phil Mirowski (University of Notre Dame) |
In this talk, Professor Mirowski guided us through his exploration of a new phase in the commercialization of the sciences with Artificial Intelligence (AI). He asked us to consider what counts as “knowledge” in the context of generative AI, while providing us with an entry point into the historical foundations of this economic and technoscientific phenomenon. Drawing on his recent work on the “platformization” of scientific production, he conducted an analysis of the DeepMind “AlphaFold” case to present his argument. | January 30, 2026, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video link |
| The Commons We Could Have Had Chris Kelty (UCLA) |
The idea of a commons was a powerful motor for the internet we could have had in the 1990s. The idea rhymed with ideas in economics, environmentalism and in the protocols and designs underlying the internet. This talk revisits some of these ideas through work that I conducted in the 1990s and 2000s on free and open source software, traces it through some of its modulations in open access and open educational resources in the 2010s, and lands in my present work focused on the urban animals and ecosystems of Los Angeles, particularly in the long history of managing the commons in water—Elinor Ostrom’s original research site. | April, 24, 2026, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | No video available |
| Programming Survival: Digital Databases and Climate Change in the Caribbean Sarah Vaughn (UC Berkeley) |
This talk asks: For whom does the computational history of the earth matter? I engage this question by examining the work of the UN-sponsored Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5C) to develop an open-access digital database. The 5C’s data collection in ‘extreme environments’ alongside the computational practices—such as coding and software development—animate what one 5C practitioner calls the Caribbean’s “cry for more data.” Activities other than data management help the 5C make sense of this lack, including international science memorandum and collaborative research workshops. This so-called conference habit is animated by the 5C’s realization that computation requires fortitude and, therefore, a re-engagement with normative ideas of data collection, growth, and developmentalism. The “cry for more data” inspires the 5C’s deep commitment to not only storage but the care of data into the future for the ‘common’ good. To this extent, I treat the 5C’s digital database as a platform for a critical reading of the 1.5˚C threshold, to pose alternatives to the sequential reading of history in the face of ongoing ecological crisis. | May, 29, 2026, 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | video_link |
| Reparative Science: How Research Can Build a Better Future Gwen Ottinger (Drexel University) |
Many of us hope to contribute to social and environmental justice through our research activities, especially community-based and participatory research. Our research can have an impact, but not by proving that harm is being done, as is commonly imagined. Rather, processes of inquiry can repair damaged social fabric by improving standards of right and wrong, strengthening accountability, making moral community more inclusive, and bolstering hope. After discussing examples from environmental justice activism, we will collectively consider how our research practices might change if we designed projects with repair, rather than proof, as their goal. | June, 26, 2026, 1:00pm EST / 9:00am PST | upcoming! |
Community Calls (2024)
| Title / Speaker(s) | Description | Date/Time | Video Link |
| Alienated Research and Data Fetishism: Fixing Reproducibility Under Neoliberal Capitalism Kyle Harp (Chapman University) |
This talk reflects on fieldwork I conducted over several months from 2016-2018 at an influential non-profit think-tank and tech development organization within the open science movement in the U.S. Within the last decade, the failure to reliably replicate most research findings and effects across a sampling of published research represented a kind of useful crisis - a scandal which helped to generate financial revenue for open science, and to fix hegemonic consensus of “good science” around Mertonian norms. A vague and floating specter of “incentive structures” (e.g. extractive journal publishers and tenure committees fixated on metrics) was identified as the symptom. Fetishized software and political technologies circulated under the banner of “open science” were the cure. I argue for a reconceptualization of the “reproducibility crisis” as a crisis unfolding from exploitative social relations and the reproduction of exhausted (research) labor under neoliberal capitalism. | April 10th at 11:00 am ET | video-link |
| Open data and common secrecies: the case of ArchEthno Florence Weber and José Sastre (ENS, France) |
Based on a fieldwork in progress among environmentalists and policy-makers, this talk will demonstrate the usefulness of a new ethnographic computer-based methodology, implemented in a software called ArchEthno. This step-by-step methodology follows three classical ethnographic stages: 1) how to discover what is important for people we ethnographers meet; 2) how to inform different people of the goals of our ethnographic research; 3) how to protect common secrecies and private information. The goal is to achieve two scientific objectives: 1) to discuss research results with different people (from different fields); 2) to disseminate common data excluding secrecies. The talk concludes with an emerging question: how to protect rights holders (content owners) concerning results, data and private materials? | April 29 at 10:00 am (ET) | no video available |
| Public, libre, commons: ethnographic refractions of free culture in Spain Alberto Corsin (National Research Council, Spain) |
In a recently co-authored book, Free Culture and the City (Cornell, 2023), I have described the history of the free culture movement in Spain as a long trans-logistical journey of democratic experimentation from the digital to the urban realms. Over a twenty-year period (1990s-2010s), free culture activists in Spain experimented with systems of congregation, apprenticeship and infrastructural design that enabled unsuspected alliances between a variety of public institutions, commons projects and social movements. In this guise, the public, the libre and the commons worked less as paradigms, typologies or philosophies of political action, than as situated, interrelated and sometimes also diffractive logics, logistics and locations of democratic process. In this talk I wish to revisit some moments of this history to extrapolate potential lessons and insights. | May 7 at 10 am (ET) | video-link |
| Advancing Open Science: NASA’s TOPS Initiative Holly Norton (Open Science Initiative, NASA) |
Join us for an engaging discussion on NASA’s open science partnerships and the Transform to Open Science (TOPS) initiative. We will explore NASA’s efforts to advance open science, the challenges faced, and the possibilities ahead for TOPS. We will hear from Dr. Holly Norton (Open Science Support Scientist at NASA Headquarters) on how NASA is addressing technical and diversity issues in parallel, and gain insights into the exciting work being done in this space. | May 22nd 11:00 am ET | video-link |
| Translating research into public policy Karen Andrade (US White House OSTP) Natasha Nudu-gama (AGU Thriving Earth) Daniel Bernal (Aire Ciudadano) |
Translating research to policy can be challenging for those trained in research. In this talk, we will talk to practitioners who have worked bridging the gap between research and policy, with particular attention to work done with environmentally impacted communities. They will present their experiences to address questions such as identifying counterparts and stakeholders for policy work, navigating changes in research priorities, collaborating with government branches, and using published materials to leverage policy work. The talk will focus on understanding better how to navigate different policy landscapes and audiences while also identifying emergent opportunities for translating research into policy at various levels of government. | 7/10 @ 12 pm ET | video-link |