Community Calls

The SEEKCommons team is pleased to introduce the “Community Call” series on the topic of the “commons of open technologies and communities,” that is, the collective and collaborative dynamics of knowledge production around community-oriented science and technology projects. This series are dedicated to the challenges, benefits, lessons learned, and uncharted possibilities of the commons as a governance framework 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)

Agenda is under preparation. Stay tuned!

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) video-link
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