We cultivate open spaces for diverse communities to connect, create, share, and experiment. Together we work to transform global knowledge systems.
Our communities include diverse identities, professions, languages, and geographies. They extend beyond the usual boundaries of the “scholarly” to include anyone pursuing the improvement of human knowledge. We seek to increase the visibility of ways of knowing, learning, and creating that are often excluded from scholarly conversations. The diversity of our community emphasizes the importance of cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration for the development of new ways of sharing and creating knowledge.
We cultivate open spaces for these communities through developing technologies and providing services. However, our work remains organic in intent. Communities cannot be built, but rather must be grown and nurtured. We are cognizant of the ways that the spaces in which those communities grow can either nourish or harm. For that reason, our openness must never come at the expense of our community; members of our community must always be in control of their identities.
Our communities do not merely exist, but exist for a purpose: to connect, create, share and experiment together. Through these interactions, we aim to both further the work of our community members and transform the systems of knowledge production we work within.
The knowledge systems that structure the production, validation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge have long privileged those in the global north, as well as those with the resources and institutional connections necessary to participate in increasingly narrow channels for publication. Our work to transform those systems is intended to open avenues for direct communication and collaboration among knowledge producers in and outside the academy and around the world, removing barriers to participation
In transforming those systems, we create forms of communication that break with the privileged, conventional modes of scholarly publishing. These include for-profit, closed access journals; anonymous, gatekeeping modes of peer review, and rigid standards of “excellence.” In stretching beyond the constraints of these systems, we can create new forms of communication that are open and inclusive, and that allow more forms of knowledge to be validated on their own terms.