Carolina Rossini

Director for International Intellectual Property

carolina@eff.org

AN INTEROPERABILITY PRINCIPLE FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND GOVERNANCE: THE ROLE OF

EMERGING INSTITUTIONS

• “‘Knowledge Governance’ brings together fresh theoretical insights and new empirical evidence on an important challenge: how to design public policies and institutions to promote knowledge creation and diffusion to promote economic development. This collection of essays will be an important source of ideas for researchers and policymakers alike.” —Bhaven N. Sampat, Columbia University

Chapter 8 of “Knowledge Governance: Reasserting the Public Interest

By Wilbanks and Rossini

•This study examines the relationships among funders, research institutions, and the “units” of knowledge creation and local knowledge governance, which are hosted inside research institutions. Our goal is to uncover the knowledge spaces where commons- based approaches, peer production and modes of network-mediated innovation have – and have not – emerged and to examine the conditions under which these approaches either flourish or are discouraged. Our rationale is that the emergence of novel, democratized and distributed knowledge governance represent a meaningful complement to more traditional systems, with the potential to create new public knowledge goods accessible to a global civil society and spur innovation in previously unforeseen ways.

“Knowledge Governance: Reasserting the Public Interest,” edited by Leonardo Burlamaqui, Ana Celia Castro and Rainer Kattel. London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285355.

knowledge and the network...

knowledge in

“permanent beta”

knowledge units:

“text”“data”“tools”

text knowledge governance:

registration

certification

dissemination

preservation

data knowledge governance

tool knowledge governance

new rules...

“distributed”innovation

1. shared standards2. shared infrastructure3. democratized access

4. rights to the user

not taking root in institutions

not taking root in institutions

old institutions, new roles:

university as public spaces

interoperability as essential condition

for new institutions

The idea of interoperability as something that scales from technology to knowledge

itself has emerged alongside the rise of the digital commons in culture and software. In this view, it is not only computer networks

that must interoperate, but intellectual property rights and semantic understanding,

so that distributed peer production of knowledge can make the leap from an

encyclopedia into the sciences and other research disciplines.

“separate concerns” in the early design of the Internet itself enabled

the emergence of distributed innovation and knowledge

construction

•it promises to transform the role of the individual inside academia by allowing more and greater access to knowledge, faster publishing and correction, more democratic peer review, at the same time that it may also allow less traditional actors to enter the knowledge governance systems, as editors, readers, critics and, hopefully at least occasionally, new partners.

University

Industry

Government

Actors in Traditional Knowledge Governance

University

Industry

Government

connect these three together into network for e-R&D

Role of Universitysufficiently complex internal policy of intellectual property to allow the open innovation and user-

driven innovation models, that asks for A2K strategies and governance

cyberinfrastructure

University

University

Industry

Government

interoperability as first principle

judge decisions by their “environmental

impact” factor.

if you care about the emergence of knowledge

federation systems that allow broader access to knowledge) you may have to have some kind of intervention…and not wait for organic emergence.

Additional material•“Knowledge Governance: Reasserting the

Public Interest,” edited by Leonardo Burlamaqui, Ana Celia Castro and Rainer Kattel. London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857285355.

•http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/06/rossini

•http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commonsbasedresearch/Industrial_Cooperation_Project