Why the commons needs memory: Future of the Commons as a recurring, archived knowledge repository

Commons-based thinking about digital knowledge infrastructure tends to live in scattered one-off conference panels, paywalled papers, or conversations that vanish once the room empties. While there are a number of efforts to gather these conversations, efforts to document and effectively archive them as institutional or community memory have been limited, and face challenges of sustenance beyond particular institutions or efforts of  individual volunteers.

 This talk will discuss an initiative to set up one such digital commons-based knowledge repository, which we also imagine as a shared, commons-based knowledge infrastructure. The Future of the Commons (FoC) is an informal, online collective, which invites community organisations, academia, technologists, archivists, creative practitioners, policymakers, GLAM professionals, open knowledge enthusiasts, Wikimedians and to meet, brainstorm and debate the digital commons. Inspired by the eponymous work by Elinor Ostrom and many others, the collective aims to foster a deeper understanding of how commons-based approaches can address contemporary challenges in technology, governance, culture, and sustainability of open, shared and community-based knowledge infrastructures. 

The collective was set up following a series of engaging conversations on the intersections of artificial intelligence, archives and Indian languages at a conference on the digital commons, organised in July 2024 by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru. Now anchored by the Open Knowledge Initiatives programme at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, it meets every month for conversations on diverse themes related to the digital knowledge commons, which are also recorded and shared via the FoC website.

Over the last two years, FoC has managed to bring together a diverse mix of cross-sector participants (Wikimedians, technologists, GLAM practitioners, AI researchers, policy observers among others) resulting in interesting, intersectional perspectives on topics ranging from digitalisation, multilinguality, accessibility to design and emerging technologies, with a focus on the global majority. This talk will share insights from some of these talks/demos/lectures, the process and challenges of bringing together an online cohort around the vast topic of the digital commons, and efforts to foreground the use of open-source technologies in building and organising the project. Importantly, it will reflect on knowledge gaps that this kind of commons-based repository aims to bridge, insights it may offer on knowledge production in multimodal contexts, what the afterlife of these projects may look like in the years to come and where they may contribute to larger conversations on the growth and sustenance of the digital commons.