
As a publisher, I tend to write only occasionally. When I do, I try to add it here.
You can also check out my contributions as Editor in Chief of Outside the Lines.
The (non-profit) business of connecting people through technology
Note: This piece was originally published in April 2019
As product manager for the Rebus Community, I’m tasked with directing the design and creation of our platform. This means taking everything we learn from the projects we’ve worked with, as well as from other community members that give us feedback, and distilling it into a coherent piece of software that does something useful. In our context, “something useful” means creating a platform to support collaborative, community-driven, open textbook publishing at scale. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Our first attempt at building this platform did some things very well, but it only had very basic communications features like commenting, without the fun/useful stuff like replies, tagging, and direct messaging. Now—and this will be a surprise to no one—when you’re trying to build a platform that supports community interactions, communications features are pretty important!
I have a complex relationship with technology, particularly with technologies that aim to facilitate human interactions. I believe they can do wonderful things, and I know that they do many, many terrible things. In a former life, I was a student and then a lecturer in communications studies, and spent many hours trying to help students develop a more critical relationship with their Facebook accounts. Having maintained an active and often grim interest in how communications technologies impact societies, cultures, and daily lived experiences, I’ve found myself recently having the recurring thought, Thank god I’m not trying to teach kids about Facebook anymore.
But, as it turns out, I’m trying to do something not all that unrelated.
Being short on resources, we ran into a hard limit on how much development time we could dedicate to fixing this problem ourselves, and instead began to investigate third party options that we could build into our platform. As you may know, we had been running a forum from early on in the Rebus lifecycle, with some success, but not as much activity as we had hoped. While there are many factors that explain that, once we began looking into different forum software options it became clear that the one we had chosen was holding us back. And this only really became clear once we found a better one. I tell you, I have never felt more nerdy than when I was jumping with excitement having found some new setting or feature that was just so awesome I couldn’t wait to use it, oh my god.
Our goal: to foster a vibrant and engaged community of OER creators
So. While we aren’t Facebook (we really, really aren’t), we are in the (non-profit) business of connecting people through technology. That’s not something we take lightly. We understand that the technologies we choose and the platform we create will shape interactions, for better or worse, as much as many other decisions we make.
In the end, we decided to close our NodeBB forum in favour of building a discussion space directly into our platform, using Discourse. We’re really excited about this transition for lots of reasons. Discourse is a smartly-built software that is extensible in interesting ways, with a vast plugin library and robust API—which basically means we can build a lot of very useful features into it and on top of it. But more importantly, we’ve found that it is built in such a way that makes it clear that the creators have spent a lot of time thinking about how to build healthy communities. They’ve thought about the behaviours we want to foster, like community leadership, and those we want to discourage, like harassment and trolling. They’ve built in encouragement and reward mechanisms, without overly commoditising or gamifying person-to-person interactions. There are useful analytics, but ones that are targeted at improving community interactions, not manipulating behaviours. And it’s open source, so if push comes to shove, if they start doing anything we don’t like or don’t agree with, we can grab our data and get the hell out of there (and take y’all with us!).
We still have an enormous responsibility to take what they’ve created and put it to work positively for the OER community, but they’ve given us a big head start.
At the same time, we are putting our own stamp on things. For one, their standard community guidelines centre around the idea of ‘civilized discourse’. Given the history of calls for ‘civility’ that have been used in tone policing, we’ve adapted their guidelines to better suit our approach and ethos. They know a lot of things, but we do too, and we know you, our community, better than anyone.
Ultimately, while I am really excited about the kinds of things we can do with our new tool, it’s only valuable to us so long as it helps us achieve our goal: to foster a vibrant and engaged community of OER creators. It’s no small thing to do, and in this age of platform lock-in, big data and privacy nightmares, we’re taking it seriously. While a frictionless experience for our users is the goal—one in which you don’t ever have to think about what’s going on under the hood—we’ll continue to be transparent about the choices we are making and why. And rest assured, my habit of staying critical of communications tech isn’t going anywhere.
With thanks to Leigh Kinch-Pedrosa for editing and inspiration, because creation is always collaborative.
Publishing As an Act, Not an Industry
Note: This piece was originally published in November 2018.
Open licenses are a hugely powerful tool in education. They have opened the door to a whole world of possibility and change. But if you start scratching at the surface of openness, to see what it means beyond open licenses, what do you find? For one, by expanding our definition and understanding of openness, we potentially have an even more powerful tool at our disposal to begin addressing systemic inequities in education, and society more broadly. As Ethan Senack recently pointed out in his post, A Broader Form of Openness, “it’s unfair to expect open licensing alone to fix [problems of inequity], or for open advocates to tackle them all at once. Lack of access, inequity, exclusion: these power structures are too deeply ingrained in, and perpetuated by, our education system.” I would add, these power structures are just as deeply ingrained in the publishing industry that produces and delivers content into that education system. But they don’t have to be.
Clearly, open licenses won’t and can’t be expected to fix these issues themselves, but as we work to create a system that produces open content, we have an extraordinary opportunity to reimagine publishing as a powerful, exciting process, instead of a closed and deeply problematic industry. When I think of a broader form of openness in education, I think of an open, democratic, inclusive publishing ecosystem that enables students, faculty, instructors, librarians, instructional designers, postdocs, other educators, and others invested in the value of education to create the content they need. In other words, content that speaks to their contexts. With that as a different kind of foundation, this community of people can, together, form a broad, accessible, vibrant ecosystem of creators and content, making education more inclusive and equitable worldwide. Dream big, right?
For now, however, I want to dig into one area that is critical to this vision, and which we need to be deliberate in addressing as a community: the question of how we can avoid replicating the issues of the traditional publishing industry. For a start, it means addressing the contrast between the process or act of publishing versus the industry that has emerged to carry out that process.
This is a difference I think about a lot. I’ll spare you a deep dive into the history of the publishing industry and the 500 years of tension between the ‘creative’ and the ‘commercial’ (buy me a drink sometime if you’re interested). Nonetheless, it does seem that some of the worst commercialisation and industrialisation of the creation process has played out in the education publishing sphere. However, nothing about it is inevitable or immutable. The act of publishing—of *making public—*of sharing your work for others to use and build on, is wonderful. And its value is not (or doesn’t have to be) commercial.
What excites me about OER is the fact that the value of the ‘product’ is not monetary. Instead, it is valuable as a teaching & learning tool, as a contribution to your field, as a publication to go on your tenure application, as a way to join a community of practice, and so much more. I don’t want to erase the money that does go into creating OER, but there’s something radical about this exchange of value in which we’re all participating. We are investing in the creation of content, and the return is that it is shared with the world for free.
Stripping away the commercial imperatives from educational publishing also allows for a radically different approach to deciding what content should be published. Traditional publishers play what could be called (if we’re generous) a “curation” role—that is, by picking and choosing which books to publish at any given time. A less generous (and more accurate) name for this role is “gatekeeping.” It is the concentration of power in the hands of a few to decide what is worthy of being made public. Yet those decisions are driven almost entirely by commercial imperatives and, even when other motivations are considered, decision making still always occurs within a commercial framework. This means, among other things, favouring books that will likely sell well, or else pricing lower-selling books at significantly higher prices. It also means prioritising ‘mainstream’ approaches, which results in far-from neutral choices. That is, whether or not the people making these decisions are white, privileged, or of higher social strata (though chances are they are – research shows that those working in publishing are overwhelmingly white and the dominance of unpaid and low-paid labour as a pathway into the industry create socio-economic barriers to entry), the interpretation of “mainstream” or “neutral” that is made generally replicates such a narrow segment. All kinds of publishing—educational, academic, and trade—tend to exist as monocultures, and this limits the opportunities for those seeking to publish from the margins.
So. How do we change this system? For one, we could and absolutely should put every effort into addressing the systemic inequalities in the publishing industry itself. However, even having the right people in the room won’t be enough if the conditions, structures and demands they are operating within don’t radically change as well. As I see it, one way to ensure real change occurs is to make the act of publishing the focus—making the processes visible and accessible, not locking them away in a closed, privatised industry. If we equip people with the means to create content as they see fit [1], they become the decision makers, with those working in publishing (that’s me, folks!) then becoming the support for this work. And really, it’s the people on the front lines of teaching and learning who know best what they need. This means if your course has small enrollment numbers, or is hyper-localised, or is made up of a majority of refugee students, or has any other number of unique and wonderful needs, you don’t have to rely on a publisher to decide whether your course is worth creating content for: you decide that for yourself. And, on the other end of the spectrum, larger institutions can come together to identify shared areas of focus, and then collaborate to create full suites of content for a particular subject, degree pathway, or other common cause.
An aside: Recently, in the context of arguing for OER creation as part of an institution’s diversity efforts, I was trying to articulate why it’s important to develop a diverse pool of creators and a focus on making content more inclusive. As I see it, affordability is about diversity—getting a more diverse group of students in the room by reducing financial barriers to accessing education. Once they are there, making them feel included (inclusivity) requires content that is relevant and representative—it is a cue that reinforces that they belong there. Seeing themselves in the content, or having it resonate with them and their experiences, is a powerful way to underscore that they belong. Okay, just wanted to get that out. Now back to my previous point.
But, I hear you asking, what about quality controls? If anyone can publish, how do we know what is good and worthwhile? Excellent question, dear reader! Had you asked me a few months ago, I would have said: Peer review! Peer review is the solution. And I do still think that it’s part of it. Although perhaps more true for monographs than textbooks, a publisher’s decision to acquire a book remains a major mark of quality. And if you remove the acquisitions process as a measure of quality, then you can, arguably, replace it with peer review. That said, I’d like to add some nuance, since peer review itself is a system that has emerged out of a fairly narrow conception of what is ‘good’ and what is not. In deeply troubling ways, peer review can and has been used to marginalise certain voices, certain worldviews, and certain ways of knowing, both throughout history and today. As such, it needs its own critical review, and I would encourage us all to think about what other measures of quality we can establish or identify—not least of which, the value the creator places on a resource by putting the time into creating it for their purposes.
Returning to where I started, Ethan prompted us to ask: “When we advocate for openness, do we do it in a way that further entrenches these problems, or do we do it in a way that keeps a broader set of values in mind?” To further the conversation, I ask: “As we develop a new publishing system to support the creation of open content, how do we do it in such a way that doesn’t further entrench the problems of the traditional publishing industry, and instead builds it on a foundation of our shared values?”
This is far from an exhaustive list of things we can do better but I hope it’s a start. Fortunately, there are some very smart and capable people working on these issues, and I do believe it’s possible for us to succeed. At the same time, however, possible doesn’t mean certain. We have to be deliberate in how we go about this, and work actively to ensure we don’t replicate the problems of the past. We can’t just stop at re-creating the same stuff, and slapping an open license on it. It would be dangerously easy to do—many of the same historic power dynamics that have shaped the existing publishing industry remain in society today, and none of us are immune to them. But hey, we’re dreaming big, remember? We can, and have to, do better.
[1] Note that I am largely referring to technological publishing solutions, but completely acknowledge that even technologies with low barriers to access have, well, barriers to access. Digital redlining is a critical consideration of any new systems of publishing, so while I’m gesturing to the advantages here, there are valid criticisms and concerns that I hope to address in another post.
With thanks to David Szanto and Ethan Senack for comments, edits & idea-bouncing, because creation is always collaborative.
Writing Published Elsewhere
Publishing Outside the Lines: A Rallying Cry
Outside The Lines, January 2025
Why Open Must Be Feminist (part 1) & How We Can Make Open Education more Feminist (part 2)
Rebus Community, July 2019
The Web We Want
Knowledge Commons, May 2023
An Open Approach to Scholarly Reading and Knowledge Management
Rebus Press, March 2018
The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far)
Rebus Press, September 2019