From 5R Permissions to 5R Practices

Format ImagePosted on by Nate
Image of an open safe deposit box.
Cropped from Open Monumenten Dag 2010 by Jeroen van Luin licensed CC BY.

I’ve been working with open resources for some time and have recently wanted to make a profound shift in the way I think about open permissions, or “the 5Rs” (Retain, Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute) as they are known. TL;DR: Let’s move away from thinking of the 5Rs as qualities of artifacts and instead think of them as tools we use in the activities of opening knowledge practices.

Our tendency to focus primarily on the openness of objects comes out of a couple of things. First, a deep bias in our (Western) culture to privilege objects over activities, primarily because objects are so much easier to collect, catalog, measure, own, and therefore buy and sell. The bias is so strong that we often turn both beings (like humans and other living things) and activities (like education or research) into objects so that they can more easily participate in the economy of things. (I can’t resist pointing to the obvious connections here to other conversations, like objectification in psychoanalytics and reification in Marxism.)

Also, it’s no surprise that we would focus on artifacts when the 5Rs and the open licensing that supports them have grown out of copyright, when copyright itself is primarily a mechanism designed to turn activities into artifacts. Copyright is a machine to produce intellectual property that makes things out of actions precisely so they can be collected, cataloged, measured, owned, and bought and sold.

The wrench that open licensing throws in the intellectual property machine has powerful and necessary effects, but for me, it’s now most important to refocus our attention on the goals we want our interventions to help us reach, and therefore, on the activity of our interventions rather than their products. This means we turn our focus away from the production and consumption of open artifacts and turn towards enabling and spreading the practices that themselves open knowledge.

So rather than focusing on questions like “Does this artifact permit me to retain/reuse/remix/revise/redistribute it?” I want to ask instead “How does retaining/reusing/remixing/revising/redistributing enable ongoing processes to open knowledge practices?”

Instead of measuring the value and openness of this or that project by the degree to which its artifacts match the 5R checklist, I want to enable and spread open knowledge practices, in part — but not exclusively — by asking if practices are or can be empowered by using the 5Rs as tools. Not all of the 5Rs are useful or necessary in every context.

For example, when folks are working to transition learning materials to open, it’s less important that every resource they use is fully “5R compliant” than it is that the transition itself generates an opening for the actual humans involved in teaching, learning and scholarship that can be sustained and improved.

We might even ask if there may be times when the 5Rs are not part of opening some specific knowledge practices at all. Food for thought.

So while I’ve seen some recent moves to define open educational practices as those that use 5R artifacts, I would reverse the priority and instead include the 5Rs as some of the tools in our open toolbelt.

Bonus question: Where were you when the 5th R was born?

Opening the Citizenship Commons

Format ImagePosted on by Nate
Painting of a sheep lamenting the death of a lamb surrounded by crows.
Anguish by August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck in the public domain.

As a part of participating in the #OpenEdMOOC, we’ve been asked to reflect on copyright, the public domain, and the commons and I’m inspired to link these topics to the thinking I’ve been doing on opening knowledge practices (OKP).

One of the fundamental assumptions I’ve been making is that OKP must be centered in public institutions like schools, colleges, universities, research groups, libraries, and maybe in some cases, nonprofits. Why? Because — at least in the US — only public institutions have both the track records to house persistent practices and are mostly aligned with the values that infuse OKP — in their missions if not always in their practices. For-profit, commercial organizations may certainly make invaluable contributions to OKP, but have not shown themselves to have the lifespans nor sufficient alignment with OKP values to be primary stewards.

Yet when I reflect on copyright, the public domain, and the commons, I’m reminded — especially in David Bollier’s The Commons, Short and Sweet — that we might best not consider the commons to be an institution of the state in the way that those public institutions I call to house OKP are. As Bollier puts it, the commons is both: “A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.” and “A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.”

So why call for OKP to be housed in organizations that so clearly rely on the state? (Though we might talk about how, at least in the US, these institutions receive less and less state funding, even if they are still sanctioned by the state.)

Having participated myself in several self-organizing commons (most often open-source technology communities), I’ve long experienced that most of these commons have great difficulty persisting unless they become quite large and have strong market connections (eg, Drupal, Linux, Mozilla) or become supported by single or multiple public institutions that have greater purposes, constituencies and resources (eg, OER, Sakai). Despite the recent weaknesses experienced by public institutions, I am far more wary of the fickleness of the marketplace as a guarantor of values-based persistence than I am of centering commons activity in public institutions authorized by governments.

Especially in the US, the main reason to house OKP in public institutions is not just that they are the best we have to do it, but also that we desperately need our public institutions to be commons: to be those places where we come together to (learn to) cooperate in the stewardship of our mutual resources. If our public institutions are not operating as commons, than they are also no longer effectively bringing us together as citizens. So as much as OKP may need public institutions, public institutions need OKP even more, so they can be better mechanisms to generate our civic connections. The alternative is to continue to degenerate further into smaller communities based on shared commonalities, but also in greater tension with the identities of other communities.

Which leads me to think about ways to evaluate governments specifically by the degree to which they support healthy commons activity in public institutions or not — something I’m sure many more than I have thought and written much about. If we decide our government is lacking in its support of the commons, we should amplify and enrich commons activity in public institutions as a mechanism to engage more people in transforming the state to be a better participant in ensuring our mutual future. The US government and many state and local governments in the US are not currently scoring well in their support of any commons. It’s time for us to infuse public institutions with open knowledge practices to enable everyone to participate in commons and ensure neither the state nor the market jeopardize or take our common resources for granted.

Why Open Matters

Format ImagePosted on by Nate
Silhouette of a woman against a sky holding her hand out.
Stand Alone Complex by haribote licensed CC BY-NC.

There are many efforts to “open” education and scholarship: open access, open data, open educational resources, open licensing, open pedagogy, open scholarship, open science, open source, and more. But why are we opening all these things?

We are motivated to open these things to improve education, research, and other knowledge practices, looking to increase access, affordability, engagement, efficacy, reproducibility, and more. We foster openness as an improvement to knowledge practices because in turn, we believe that improved knowledge practices will benefit both individuals and the common good, generating better knowledge, more widely shared, and therefore justice, equality and progress.

But the existence of things like open educational resources, open licenses, open data, or open-source software do not by themselves guarantee that people benefit in their efforts overall as students, teachers, researchers, scholars or librarians, or that their success in turn improves our common good.

Sometimes we get so caught up in providing open resources or in establishing the necessary conditions for openness that we mistake that work as the ends, when it is only the means. In order for the benefits of openness to develop and persist, it is not enough that open just be technically possible or that open artefacts exist. Openness is not the goal, it is a mechanism.

People must be equipped and practice to succeed with open. We need to actively support not only infrastructure and materials, but also communities and practices that build motivation, understanding, skills, and values for people to engage over time for their own benefit and the public, common good.

Openness is our vehicle, not our destination.