Hello, everyone. I'm Senthilsson. I am an independent researcher, artist, and sometimes contributor to digital governance. I am a community member at Medigas, and I also do some contracting with the organization for a fellowship program that's upcoming. And today, I have the great honor of welcoming Janneke Adeyema to speak with us today. I'll give a brief bio, and then just briefly introduce Janneke. So, Janneke is a cultural and media theorist working in the fields of book publishing and digital culture. She is an associate professor in digital media at the at the Center for Post Digital Cultures at Coventry University, where she convenes the post publishing research strand. In her research, she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processional and performative publishing, radical open access, post publishing, scholarly poet poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. I currently learned of, Yannigan's work through COPIM, which is a community of people and organizations working to build a fairer, more open future for scholarly books. In particular, Koplan has written extensively on the topic of community led governance and infrastructure. So given MediGov's research interests in community self governance, as well as efforts toward the MediGov journal, I reached out to Janneke to learn more about her

her to present some of her research with the MediGo community. In today's presentation, Janneke will share learnings from COPIM and some of the research that's going on on creating community owned features for open access books by scaling small and co designing governance. As Nitin mentioned, Janneke is gonna give a twenty minute presentation followed by a facilitated discussion. So as Janneke is going along, please write your questions and thoughts in the chat, and I will manage and facilitate the discussion afterwards. And with that, I'll pass it over to Janneke.

Thanks so much. Okay. Let me set up my screen very quickly. And also, already apologies because I think I might have about twenty five minutes of presentation. I got too enthusiastic, so, I hope, I hope that's okay. So yes, many thanks for inviting me, Sint, and also to the Metagof community for having me here today. So, in this talk I will explore how the principle and the philosophy of scaling small has been and is being implemented in practicing two outcomes of the coping project that Sentra already mentioned which is a project in a community that I've been a part of for the last six years now. So these outcomes are the Open Book Collective and the Experimental Publishing Compendium. But I will start with saying a little bit more about the governance principle of scaling small. So scaling small, as outlined more in detail in the article written by Samuel Moore and myself that is referenced on the slide, is an alternative organizational principle for governing community led academic publishing projects that are based on mutual reliance, care and other forms of commoning. So this principle eschews kind of standard approaches to organizational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale and instead it puts forward the idea that scale can be nurtured through intentional collaborations between community driven publishing projects that promote a biblically diverse ecosystem while providing resilience through research sharing and other kinds of collaboration. So scaling small allows for the collective coordination of resource across a diverse ecology of organisations that creates a meta community or a community of communities for the provision of diverse approaches to publishing. So following Annette Singh's recommendations to keep in mind how reimagining our knowledge practices requires that we pay particular attention to articulations between the scalable and the non scalable, What is needed to enable this is first and foremost a rethinking of existing knowledge systems and infrastructures and how they currently function. So these are systems that have historically developed and been continuously remade to encourage further scalability. Now non scalability theory as Singh envisions it is about looking around rather than ahead to cultivate a kind of vulnerability to unexpected encounters. So this will allow scales to arise from the relationships that inform particular projects, scenes or events. And this is in line with what we theorize as scaling small, where instead as scale making projects do, which is competing for the scholars or world builders attention by scaling up and expanding, the trick is to trace or make relationships between projects. So this would involve rethinking our knowledge or publishing practices which have been shaped as part of an economic system that has been focused on growth and profits and on remaking the world for scalability. So non scalability theory to which in this context we would include the notion of scaling small should then be perceived as Singh argues as a way to reconceptualize the world and perhaps rebuild it. So non scaling is key here to remaking to remaking of cultural diversity and multi species publishing landscapes. So what is needed to enable this is first and foremost a reimagining of what academic collectivity, community and commonality is and could be in a digital publishing environment. So the relationalities of publishing that we are arguing for here focus on achieving scale across multiple organisations with again a focus on care, collectivity and cooperation instead of competition. So in what ways then can the publishing initiatives that Sam and I promote and supports be able to become resilient whilst as we would call it scale small? So due to their size and often not for profit background these small and scholarly open access projects do face various structural constraints from lacking skill sets and experience to insufficient market leverage. But what is important to note here is that these projects tend to work according to capacity from a few books a year to several dozens in order to keep it manageable to the people that are involved in these projects which is also easier to achieve when there is not a profit motive. However when taken together in different constellations these independent community driven projects do have the potential to create a supportive ecosystem to sustain the scholarly commons. So working from individual projects to contributing to collective and collaborative ones will allow these projects to retain their independence and to honour their not for profit character while providing a framework capable of making publishing more resilient. So two models in specific characterise scholarly presses and when stimulated could help them become more resilient. So firstly a model that focuses on alliances of small independent projects within a certain sector such as publishers in collectors horizontally, and secondly collaboration across sectors or fields vertically to create multi stakeholder ecologies. So horizontal collaborations in collectives or consortia facilitated through unions of small and independent presses or publishing communities taking on book series or journal projects can provide mutual aid and logistical support, shared services and best practices. So for examples of horizontal scaling, you could look at the Radical Open Access Collective, which is a community of 80 plus scholar led not for profit presses, journals and other open access projects, which have been sharing resources, tools and expertise for more than ten years now. And the Scholarlette Collective which is a consortium of seven established Scholarlette academic publishers who have grown as a successful horizontal non scaled organisations and links to these projects are on the slides. Now an important way in which scholarly press have proven to be resilient is in bringing down costs by working together in non competitive fashion. But at the same time, they've also been very transparent about their finances. See the slides for some examples of writings on the cost of publishing and of running a press that they have produced to share knowledge on this front, but also to show how cost savings can be made on a small scale. And this is quite something in a publishing industry that's not transparent at all about finances. And there's also an active focus on using, building, and sharing open source tools and platforms to pay make publishing more efficient, to reduce reliance on commercial solutions and intermediaries, and in this way to create cost efficiencies in the system. And again, there are now several efforts of food to start bringing these resources together in toolkits and information platforms to stimulate others to set up presses. So see, for example, the Radical Open Access Collective's information platform, or which is much more up to date, so I would recommend that one. The Open Book Collectives toolkit for small and scholarly open access publishers. And this effort towards resource and skill sharing characterises the largest scholarly publishing community as a whole but there is a focus on distributing lessons learned and best practices across organizations on collaboration and mentoring also of smaller and newer initiatives of co publishing and of community and consortium forming on various levels. Now we see this emphasis on collaboration also in experiment with publishing models, so see for example the communal editing and publishing models that are favored by Open Humanities Press and Language Science Press as well as other collaborations and funding arrangements with public not for profit institutions such as libraries and universities who have similar motivations towards the open dissemination of scholarly content. So one other benefit of small scale has been exactly the capability to experiment something that the larger publishing companies have been hesitant to do being generally more risk adverse and conservative. So scholarly presses have been important trendsetters in exploring new publishing models being known for their cutting edge experiments with multimodal, open, living and processional books and publishing projects and for exploring alternative practices and formats in humanities publishing and I will come back to this later when discussing the experimental publishing compendium. So scaling small also critiques the idea that publishing needs to be able to scale globally instead of for example serving local communities foremost. So as Gary Hall from OP Menace Press has argued global scale risks repeating and maintaining the kind of centre periphery relationality of power that we want to challenge where a few global North countries end up universalising what counts as valid knowledge. But beyond enabling horizontal and vertical alliances as Lucy Barnes and Rupert Gatti from Open Book Publishers states, scaling small also involves the creation of infrastructures that allow many presses to thrive at multiple scales instead of taking up a competitive model in which some presses grow stronger in expense of others or by usurping others. What is needed here is an investment in and maintenance of robust open source community owned and collectively managed shared infrastructures that allow this diversity to exist instead of outsourcing the necessary digital processes to commercial entities or platforms. So the COPIM or community led open publication infrastructures for monographs projects which after project end has now transformed into the COPIM community, has done exactly this by developing the infrastructures, models, workflows and platforms that scholar led publishers need. For example, the opening of future collective subscription model and the TOTE Open Metadata Management and Dissemination System, as well as the Open Book Collective which I will discuss later. So COPIM as a largely horizontal governed community led project has from the outset argued for the importance of developing and maintaining community owned and led open infrastructures to support quality communication, or in our case, a publication of open access books. So we developed the governance structures for the Copin project and its outcomes based on a mixed methodology of co design and co development that included desk research which resulted in the scaling small article that you've just seen, three research reports on community governance and a series of research and documentation blog posts. In addition to that we organised both internal and external stakeholder workshops, interviews with project members and exchanges with similar like minded projects including the OperaSP project and the Next Generation Library publishing project. And we also set up a community governance working group or advisory board. So with this process we aim to cover the needs of the project as a whole as well as in an applied form the various open digital infrastructures, platforms, workflows and financial models that the project developed in support of the enduring resilience of open access book publishing. Now in our desk research we explored what community governance is by looking at a variety of approaches to and models of governance that are being used within like minded not for profit open scholarly communication organizations such as Cielo, AMELICA and EDUCOPIA. So we asserted from this that governance is situated which is to say that it depends on the kind of organization network project or infrastructure being governed, the community governing it and the scale of its operations. We organised several internal governance workshops to co design and co develop the project's governance elements which were structured on the basis of the institutional analysis and development IAD framework developed developed by Eleonore Ostrom in the 1980s and further updated since in the context of the knowledge commons by Frischmann et al. Which is more outlined in his COPIM research report is a framework designed to study commons rather than governance but is still helpful for exploring what it is that makes the commons successful. So our workshops then looked at resources that the project shares and consumes, who make up its community, what are its goals and objectives and its history and narrative and where is the project heading. Now during our first internal workshop we looked at how COPIN members identified the community of communities they consist of and developed COPIN's mission and vision statements as well as the values and principles that guide the projects based on the next generation library publishing project's values and principles framework which we consulted to try and translate our values into actionable principles. So during each workshop three groups were formed that each tried to formulate the various governance elements that we identified during our initial research followed by a discussion between the three groups. We subsequently colour coded the notes made by each group and when we wrote up these governance elements we took an active effort to keep the voices of the different groups alive by ensuring not one voice or colour in this case became dominant, something that easily happens when writing up qualitative research. We then shared these co designed governance elements with the COPIM communities to further incorporate feedback via co development methods which involved various rounds of feedback on these draft elements also from the members of the community governance working group. So from the discussions we had during the first workshop several key points emerged that further structured our governance research and methodology including the fact that we wanted these governance elements themselves to be a form of intervention into what they commonly are seen to be, like the standard values and mission statements. By using different less formal or legal language, for example, but also by not resolving all the friction that came up in our discussions into uniform and consensus based elements, but showcasing this friction. So these points included a focus on intervention and friction, on perceptual and situated co design and co developments, recognizing that there will always be hierarchical, horizontal and cooperative elements within the governance models that we are designing, creating a model that is flexible and can develop further once the project grows and the community further develops, community led and inclusive involving a governance working group and future governance communities and knowledge exchange with like minded projects. So this method or approach is something we tested out in first instance when we co designed COPIM's code of conduct to ensure governance is an activity of community co development, not just assigned by one group at one time but continually evolving as the project itself evolves. So COPIMS code of conduct has been based on different elements and remakes of existing code of conducts which have subsequently been developed further by the project members in a process of co design. But this approach and methodology also subsequently informed our design of the governance of one of the key outputs of the COPIM project, the Open Book Collective or OPC, which is also an example of what I previously called vertical scaling. So enabling collaboration between the various stakeholders within scholarly publishing. So the OPC is a non profit member led values based organisation that brings together open access book publishers, open publishing infrastructure providers and libraries, all committed to collectively reimagining and reconfiguring the funding and circulation of open access monographs and working in collaboration to secure a more sustainable and equitable future for them. So through the OBC's online platform, publishers and infrastructure providers, offer individual and collective membership packages, which libraries and other potential supporters can pay to support. But the OBC is not just the financial intermediary between OA initiatives and funders but instead it's an interdependent and mutually reliant community of persons and organizations that all have a vested interest in the transformation of academic book publishing. So working together to move the needle toward a fully open public comments and away from the enclosure of knowledge of traditionally traditional proprietary publishing. Now when designing the governance model of the OBC OBC we had to kind of balance desire for a community led governance model and the values, principles and practices that we co developed with the regulations of the OBC's articles of association which have been based on guidance from the UK Charity Commission. So the OBC is a UK registered charity and is incorporated as a not for profit company. The governance of the OBC consists of three primary governance bodies the General Assembly of Custodians, the Board of Stewards and the Membership Committee. Both within the Board and the Committee, decisions made by consensus are preferred over having to vote on matters conducted by these entities. So in the terms of the UK Charity Commission the OBC adopts what is called an association model as opposed to a foundation model in which only trustees can vote. In an association model there's a wider membership which includes voting members other than the trustees. So the UBC defines itself more specifically as a community led and membership driven organization and we wanted to reflect this amongst others in the language we use in its governance model. For example trustees are stewards and members are called custodians. And furthermore, while its incorporation as a charity necessitates having a board of trustees or stewards, the OVC governance model has been designed to ensure that there is a balance between the rights of the members or custodians to make decisions and the steward's general responsibility for running the organisation. So the OBC custodians elect the stewards and can vote on certain binding and non binding matters and the stewards are also answerable to the custodians and are elected by them but are given control over the management of the organisation at all other times. In this way the governance of the OBC emphasized a model in which the collective of custodians are also final decision makers by virtue of their representation on the board. So the OBC's governance model ensures that the OBC is fully responsive to and guided by its custodians as well as by external open access experts selected from the community of communities sitting within the larger landscape of scholarly communications And if these graphs are not very clear, I'm happy to talk a little bit more about them later because I know they're a bit complicated if you just look at them like this. So in addition to its articles of association, the OBC's governing model is also supported by some further elements that we co designed, a DEI statement, a conflict of interest policy, and a code of conduct. Now, ultimately, the governments of the OBC has been designed to empower unique collaborative community of OA creators, libraries with vested interest in growing the landscape of non proprietary open access initiatives, an open access expert who have deep knowledge in the histories and theories of scholarly communications and orphan access. So I want to end my talk with another outcome of the coping projects which we're currently developing a governance model form, the experimental publishing compendium. So the compendium is a guide and reference for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians and designers who want to challenge, push and redefine the shape, form and the rationale of scholarly books. So it's the outcome of an extended and collaborative research process which has culminated in a practical resource for the academic community to help authors, publishers and others involved in knowledge production to get started with experimental, multimodal and practice based publishing projects or to support their faculty or students in doing so. So the linked entries in the compendium inspire speculations on the future of the book and the humanities and encourage publishers and authors to explore publications beyond the standard codex format. So as a resource and toolkit the Compendium gathers tools, examples of experimental books and experimental publishing practices. So for the tools and platforms we have focused on free and open source software platforms and digital publishing tools that presses and authors can either use freely and or further adapt to their own publishing workflows. So you can see on the slide one of the examples of an experimental book that's listed in a compendium. And on the side you can see some of the tools and experimental publishing practice that relate to this publication or that it embodies and you can click on these tools and practices for further information and scroll through the compendium in that way too. Experimental publishing practices capture new ways of relating around digital books and include practices such as annotating, collaborative writing, forking, remixing, reviewing, translating, versioning and designing. So each practice is accompanied by a short essay situating the practice and how it applies to experimental publishing highlighting examples of how the practice is being used to create experimental books. In a compendium we have linked tools, practices and books together charting the relationship between a book and its process of production and publication. So users can scroll through the website both horizontally and vertically offering several different routes through the compendium and a more associative navigation. Now over the last year, we have worked on the governance model of the compendium, which we are currently implementing, taking into consideration the specific characteristics, functions, and needs of the compendium and the communities that it serves. So as part of our desk research, we compared governance models implemented and set up by similar toolkits and resources. Be they more formal, so in the form of governance models, boards, etcetera, or more informal including just public description of who is responsible for maintaining and updating the resource, who decides what is included, and how this is organised. Now we felt an extended governance system for the compendium was important as the current editors are supported by project funding and provide labor on a voluntary basis. And our research also showed that most similar toolkits and the resources listed within them can become rapidly obsolete, have outdated information listed, and sometimes even become nonfunctional after project funding ends or are not regularly maintained. So setting up an extended governance model and community that also outlines a plan for further development of the compendium after current project funding ends is crucial to its long term resilience, given how the lack of this kind of governance can result in anything from buyouts of open infrastructures to substantial changes to them that challenge their openness or community focus. So we've now devised a structure where the compendium will be providers, So we want to make sure that representatives of publishers, authors and tool providers are all represented in this community, again reflecting the experimental publishing community. We also learned from our desk research that resources that have been initiated by organisations that either oversee them or that provide resources mostly in the form of server space and volunteer labour are the most resilient. So a parent organisation can also provide credibility to a resource or toolkit and establish connections to a wider community. So having a more formal entity connected to the Compendium therefore seems important and I'm currently writing a white paper that outlines how the compendium can actually relate to the Open Book Collective, including by proposing to have a member of the OPC Board of Steward sit on the compendium advisory community. And again, I think this kind of connection that we're trying to make between different projects emphasizes really well the principle of scaling small. And I'll leave it at that. And if you have any questions, just let me know. Thank you so much.

Yeah. Definitely. Let me very if I can really quickly do that. I'm always a little bit slow with my laptop is mostly very slow, then I can show very quickly the model again. I'm also very proud of one of our nice designers made them. So when I whenever I can so, yeah, if you can see so, we forgot number eight. That's OA experts, we call them. So yes. So, basically, what we have is that the board of stewards has nine people. And so we've got caucuses, so libraries, publishers, and service providers. So each group in a community is basically representing a board of stewards. And that leaves two spots for what are called OA experts, which can be kind of, yes, suggested both by, those caucuses, but also, by the assembly of custodians. So they put forward suggestions to the board, and then the board of stewards, puts them forward as part of the general elections that we have, and then people can vote for the experts. So, yeah, we'll always ensure that we have at least two people that are external basically to, the assembly as part of and also to kind of keep us fresh. And it is also a way because one of the things that we felt maybe missed a little bit because these tend to be scholarly presses, but a lot of those presses have actually become more independent, if that makes sense. So a lot of scholars are not actually connected to academia anymore. They're acts scholars, etcetera. And we wanted to make sure that there's also a spot for academics within the governance system. So the OA experts, the ideal would be that they are actually academics working on governance or on open access, etcetera, that can inform the board. So yeah.

Yeah. So pretty good. Fantastic questions. So yeah. So in to start with your first questions around boundary commoning, I think in a in a paper, we talk about two different forms of commoning that we kind of juxtapose a little bit, but I think they're very much connected to. One is the kind of idea of the latent comments, right, which is more informal, you could say. And we use the example of the Radical Open Access Collective there. So that's not an incorporated organization, for example. And the kind of, you know, this the governance that we have is very kind of horizontal and kind of, yeah, free flowing in that sense. And we compare that with the kind of the boundary commoning, which is much more focused on having what we are we see it as kind of established institutions with their own governance models, and how they can still collaborate together in that sense. So, in the article, we talk about the coping project, actually, as an example. But I would say that the open book collective is a very good example of this kind of boundary commoning also because, you know, we have a lot of scholarly presses that some of them are incorporated and others are not. But they kind of then we kind of situate ourselves in these kind of different governance structures and bring them together in that sense. Also reflecting governance elements that they these presses, etcetera, already use. And at the same time, what is also interesting is that we're working with libraries. And libraries, of course, wherein these scholar led presses, I would say, are kind of more or less in control of their own governance systems. Libraries function within, of course, our higher education systems internationally. Right? So and we all know how hard it is to engage with any form of often very untransparent governance within higher education institutions. So there's also that's again these these clashes and frictions that do happen. But still we make it work. Right? We wanna kind of we wanted to create a system, in in which we can kind of work together to promote the kind of the commoning of resources that we argue for as a project. And I think the experimental publishing compendium is, again, an example of a a latent comments in that sense. So we don't want we don't want to make that too formal. We also don't want to incorporate it, but we are still trying to use similar kind of principles and methods and ideas behind it. So in that sense, I would say that it can work on those different levels. So I wouldn't oppose them necessarily. They're kind of different ways of engaging and also engaging with the reality of how, you know, legal structures in different countries operate. And your question about experiences, I think there's there's two things to say there. Like, one would be the experience of people having to start use. These kind of, what you can say or argue, I think, are very conceptual models. In first instance, they come from a very conceptual background. Now, we the benefit is that we're working with academics. So, you know, that already helps a little bit in people understanding the conceptual ideas behind it. But still, it's hard to kind of communicate this. But I think part of what we did within the Copen community is these these workshops, which for some people might have been like, why do we need to do another workshop on governance? And we kind of forced everybody to do this. So people were involved in it. So they were involved in the creation already. So I think that also helps a little bit. It's not a model that just gets imposed on people at some point, like, oh, this is what we're gonna do. But, no, everybody was part of that. And, and, of course, now that the project is developing. Right? It's after project from the open book collective is is its own entity that's connected to and still, separate from COPIM too. Things are changing. And I've already had a look at, at at the model that looks like now. It's it's a little bit different, which, you know, happens, and and things will adapt, which is also something, you know, I think we built that into the model to be flexible enough to do that. And on the other end, this aspect of people coming from the outside. So one of the things that for us was really important, and I know that I keep hammering on about sometimes it seems a bit empty, these kinds of community led values driven, all kinds of stuff. But I cannot emphasize how important this is in a higher education landscape in which libraries and their funding, and they have to make decisions on where their funding goes based on these kind of elements. And the fact that we can actually support evidence driven, like, these these are projects you wanna support, is very crucial. And I think a lot of libraries find that very helpful. Instead of getting another generative kind of, like, hi. Support our project. They actually know that we fetted this, that it lines up with the values that libraries are also, working towards. So so, yeah, that's very important. We've got good feedback on that, so that's been helpful.

Yeah. No. Brilliant question. So, again, I think this is an ongoing battle that we have to, face as ScholarLab publishers making the argument for why what we are doing is important and is needed. And I think one of the main things that we say is that, especially in the humanities, the the current commercial publishing system is completely unsustainable. Right? It's it's it's extracting public funding that already is nonexistent from the public first or that goes into the profits of big commercial international publishing companies. So we need a new model, and that's something that we've been arguing for for a long time. And, of course, we do get this aspect of, oh, but you're just, you know, a bunch of small, you know, not relevant. And this is just simply not true. And this is what, you know, we kind of wanted to write that article for about two that showcase that actually these small I had another slide that I didn't put in here, but there is this kind of platform called OAPN, which is a library of open access book publishers. And it's filled with kind of university presses, scholarly presses. And, actually, they have a collection called the scholarly collection. And if you look at that collection, that is actually together the biggest collection on the platform. So again, this shows how working together does create this element of skill. Right? And, and another argument we make is that we often get this thing like, oh, there's a long kind of conversation about the difference between sustainability and resilience. And we emphasize the fact that most of the presses that we've been working with have been doing this for over twenty years and have proven themselves to be sustainable and resilient. Right? So So, yeah, but it is an ongoing question and argument that we need to kind of make. And it isn't easy. And it isn't easy now that library funding is being cut internationally again. And but luckily, I mean, I I do think that that is luckily that a lot of librarians share our ideas and missions. They've also always been fantastic allies. Funding for open infrastructure is something that we keep, you know, arguing to to kind of be less reliant on the Amazons and all kinds of other infrastructures that we use that we have to use often and the kind of infrastructures that the big publishing companies, they've kind of created this completely pathway through from from researcher to dissemination to, what is it, citation management and metrics that they all own and all the data they profit from. So it's it's kind of highlighting that we can't have this. It's so important that we maintain some diversity there. And do these models spill? Of course. Yeah. All the time. And I think

need to be realistic about the fact that actually the way that these commercial publishers work is also based on I mean, this is what I keep saying. It's put trust by volunteer labor. So these publishing systems, of the big commercial publishers are based on extracting volunteer labor in the form of peer review and editorial work from scholars, which, you know, they do not pay us for. Is that sustainable? I don't think so. Right? And and if we as academics at any point, which I hope we will and a lot of us do already, would extract that from the proposition, That model will completely collapse. Right? So is that sustainable? I don't know. And so, yeah, the the failure of of the kind of models we're working with is I think it's partly to do with the fact that we're trying to do something new. So sometimes it it it takes a little bit of time. And again, we take a lot of inspiration for from like minded, projects and also projects in different spaces. And of course, we've also been looking at the Metagov community before. And at the same time, I think for a lot of people, it it takes a lot of time to, yeah, familiarize themselves with these kind of models and and how we've set them up. And we're also aware that the people that we're working with tend to be working academics that then also run presses. And then also in the kind of systems that we have often sit on multiple boards. So we're asking a lot from people, and this can be hard to to navigate. Right? So I think that's one of the main issues that we're already, you know, giving so much volunteer labour. But at the same time, I think the way that we've been doing that is that we try to be accommodating and distribute this as much as possible. And, yeah, we make it work in some way. That's the kind of best way that I can summarize. Yeah. So yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Really good question. I think to start with the friction, I think I would say, how do we accommodate that Arkeemus Live? I I think for us in our community, that hasn't been much of an issue. So I think the core members were around 50 people, and these are very outspoken people. So we have no issues with critiquing each other and, and kind of pointing out where we don't agree, disagree, tend to agree, want to agree, but maybe not. So I think this is, So I think this is this is very much a reflection of how the community has operated. Right? And this is kind of it comes from lot of a few very driven individuals and groups of individuals that have set up presses and that, you know, these are they're babies. It's their world. They've you know? And they wanna argue for the things. So keeping that, friction alive is just something that is something more of a necessity than something, you know, it it it will always be there. And I think it's it's that acknowledgment to and I do think that that sets the community a little bit apart from other ones because I'm also part of other communities in which, you know, the thinking is much more consensus based or towards consensus. But for this community in specific, friction has been key. And and this kind of done work through in the kind of, in various of the governance elements. So indeed, like, in the way that we designed them as you saw, but also in the way that, you know, the way that we vote and and kind of although we kind of want to work towards a consensus model, that's the preferred way. So but this is is not necessarily based on, oh, we're just gonna have a vote and then, you know, be done with it. It's five four. And, no, we kinda wanna have a model in which we actually talk about this long enough until we agree or till we find a way that we can move forward. And and I think that's although that sounds like it's against the friction, it's actually where the friction comes forward. We give it space in that sense and kind of have it outspoken, and it's part of minutes, etcetera. So I think that's important. And then I think the other question around the crawling of the comments. So I think within our community, there are basically two perspectives on this. So first to say that, you know, this already happened before the whole generative AI and kind of so we've had circumstances which in the past, for example, Amazon has been doing it for a while. So they scrape kind of digital content and make these kind of books that you can then buy online that are based on on on kind of scraped content. And a lot of the presses that we've worked with have started off with using CC BY licenses, which, of course, allow a lot of this. And within academia, of course, you know, this is to one extent problematic because authors don't tend to like it especially in the case of books because you know authors like this idea of oh this is my book published by this reputable press who is this weird? I think they were called Saint Philip's press or something on Amazon that actually kind of scrolls back through all these things. And then you can buy the same book but with a lousy cover from Amazon. And so some of the presses were not happy with this and actually started asking for takedown notices, etcetera, which I think is interesting given the fact that, you know, we do it is allowed under a CC BY license. And others were kind of seeing this like, okay, this is part of, you know, the experiment of what we do, of what the commons mean. So it does sometimes mean that, you know, things get used in a way that you do or do not like. And I think this also comes back again in the use of licenses, right? Because I think it's a little bit discussions between copyrights and copyleft licensing and and a kind of more emphasis on having licenses that only allow, not for profit reuse, for example, or reuse by people with similar values and governance models. And we are very much experimenting with these kind of licenses also. There's a license called CC four r that my colleagues, Eva Weinmeier and and Femke Snelting, have been working on a lot with a community of collaborators, which is kind of a conceptual license, which tries to it's called collective conditions for reuse and now they're changing it in collective commitment to reuse. I've been working on and so there are a lot of kind of conversations around how to manage these kind of aspects of crawling and reuse of, let's say, stuff that we put in in the comments. So I I personally am very interested in looking more into these kind of copy left licenses and seeing what we can do. But again, with licenses, I think the issue is you can put a license on it, but, you know, doesn't mean anything if if it can't be enforced or if we don't enforce it. So it's it's that's another question around, yeah, how how how do we protect the boundaries of the comments? I think this is a question we also still need to learn more about. So if you have suggestions or ideas or concepts for that, please do share.

Yeah. So this is indeed this this very important element of trust. Right? It's called the communication, which, you know, we tend to connect to to a publisher's name or to an author's name, right? So we kind of say, okay, this is written by this person or published by this press. And we kind of decide whether it's, you know, something we trust and we think is important enough to to read because of this. And this is also partly why, you know, again, what I said a lot of authors and and publishers get really upset when, you know, their stuff gets crawled and reused in other places and this idea of the integrity of the text. I myself am a little bit more skeptical around this. I would say that there is no such thing as integrity of text or specific trust. I think that that relates much more to how we decide to work together than that it necessarily has to lie within an author's name or in a a publisher. And I think we always need to. I think we've just got so accustomed to certain ways of vetting information while that information isn't always accurate too. So So I I have, like, a little bit of a grudge against Routledge, the publisher, for example, which I think is an incredibly crappy press. But people keep publishing with them because they think, oh, it's Routledge. It's a big name. It's it's not a good press. Right? So it's, for me, it's much more interesting to start thinking how we can actually rethink the way that we value information and maybe rethink it for a digital age that goes away a bit.

So that we do have much good stuff on. So we've got if you if you're interested in metadata and specific, have a look at Totes, the open metadata system. So one of the things that we've been working on there is that within the library world, a lot of there's exist, like, 40 different metadata systems that are all not interoperable and that all cost money. So, what we started to develop is tote, this platform, which kind of opens this all up so that it can be distributed and that you can use it in your different libraries and you can edit it. And and so that for me is a very important revolution. So those elements, I 100% agree. You know, we should have those elements as openly available and as clearly trusted from a trusted source. But I think that's ever so slightly different from the more conceptual questions of where trust lies in, you know, how we now normally see trust being lying in a publishing system, which in academia is is much more based on this kind of reputation idea, which I think needs some rethinking. Let's just say it like that.

So my own website is on openreflections.org. So you can find my research and talks and everything there. And again, for the Copium collective, we've got an open documentation site which is on pop up. But we're going to move that up because pop up is no longer going to be an open and free system. But it's currently on copium.hophop.org, I think. And I think that community is a brilliant one to follow if you're interested in the kind of models that we're and, otherwise, I'm happy to share my presentation with anybody for links, etcetera, so you can find things. But everything should be fine, you know, just Google stuff, and and you should be able to find or whatever search engine you like to use.

Thanks, everyone. Bye.