Knowledge Commons
Knowledge-In-Practice
A major challenge facing the climate movement is the knowledge-action gap. It would be a mistake to separate from knowledge commons practical knowledge, especially knowledge embodied in practice. Taken together, such collective action, or mass climate action, is the practical realization of climate knowledge commons relative to their essential purpose.
In Red Alert, Dr Wildcat describes how Indigenous ingenuity or indigenuity addresses this dilemma:
The ability to solve pressing life issues facing humankind now by situating our solutions in Earth-based local Indigenous deep spatial knowledges of tribal peoples - constitutes a practical merger of knowing with doing. Their lifeways embody knowing as doing... an ability to work with what they have available and the wisdom to ensure, such as they can, that they can continue doing it.
Conversely, what "Western" society lacks but so desperately needs is "practical knowledge about living well brought about by a lifetime of attentiveness to something other than our own human-produced culture."[1]
Ultimately, this approach aligns with adopting the most advanced complexity models of experimental science concerning the current situation of global burning or climate collapse:
By doing so, we might move away from thinking about a single solution for the problem we face and toward thinking about our participating in an emerging world where we do not wring our hands and fail to act, but act even in little ways, in personal choices, to contribute to emerging systems - in other words, societal properties - that might slow the accelerating decline in the diversity of life we are now witnessing.[2]
Monocultures of the Mind
Intellectual Colonization
See also: Traditional Ecological Knowledge
The disappearance of local knowledge through its interaction with the dominant western knowledge takes place at many levels, through many steps. First, local knowledge is made to disappear by simply not seeing it, by negating its very existence. This is very easy in the distant gaze of the globalizing dominant system. The western systems of knowledge have generally been viewed as universal. However, the dominant system is also a local system, with its social basis in a particular culture, class and gender. It is not universal in an epistemological sense. It is merely the globalized version of a very local and parochial tradition. Emerging from a dominating and colonizing culture, modern knowledge systems are themselves colonizing.[3]
... The first level of violence unleashed on local systems of knowledge is to not see them as knowledge. This invisibility is the first reason why local systems collapse without trial and test when confronted with the knowledge of the dominant west. The distance itself removes local systems from perception. When local knowledge does appear in the field of the globalizing vision, it is made to disappear by denying it the status of a systematic knowledge, and assigning it the adjectives 'primitive' and 'unscientific'. Correspondingly, the western system is assumed to be uniquely 'scientific' and universal. The prefix 'scientific' for the modern systems, and 'unscientific' for the traditional knowledge systems has, however, less to do with knowledge and more to do with power. The models of modern science which have encouraged these perceptions were derived less from familiarity with actual scientific practice, and more from familiarity with idealized versions of which gave science a special epistemological status. Positivism, verificationism, falsificationism were all based on the assumption that unlike traditional, local beliefs of the world, which are socially constructed, modern scientific knowledge was thought to be determined without social mediation. Scientists, in accordance with an abstract scientific method, were viewed as putting forward statements corresponding to the realities of a directly observable world. The theoretical concepts in their discourse were in principle seen as reducible to directly verifiable observational claims. New trends in the philosophy and sociology of science challenged the positivist assumptions, but did not challenge the assumed superiority of western systems. Thus, Kuhn, who has shown that science is not nearly as open as is popularly thought, and is the result of the commitment of a specialist community of scientists to presupposed metaphors and paradigms which determine the meaning of constituent terms and concepts, still holds that modern 'paradigmatic' knowledge, is superior to pre-paradigmatic knowledge which represents a kind of primitive state of knowing.[4]
Indigenous Realism
In Red Alert, Dr Wildcat defines Indigenous Realism on the basis that:
Our human knowledge of reality must always be approached with humility. In North America many indigenous traditions tell us that reality is more than just facts and figures collected so that humankind might wisely use resources. Rather, to know "it" - reality - requires respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life. I call this indigenous realism and it entails that we, members of humankind, accept our inalienable responsibilities as members of the planet's complex life system, as well as our inalienable rights.
Consequently, to overcome the ecological amnesia resulting from the media culture/attention economy separating its subjects from the natural environment, the conclusions of experimental climate science must be combined with the "deep spatial experiential body of knowledge" which derives from "paying attention to the life surrounding us."
Seeing that knowledge resides in life, the commons approach to knowledge construction as as a social or collective enterprise is extended "to a cooperative activity involving the other-than-human life that surrounds us" including what Pacha Mama (Mother Earth) herself is telling us.
This knowledge pertains to the ecological catastrophe, i.e. the "dramatic change that threatens tribal lifeways and those of most humans on the planet," and "how we might adopt life-enhancing cultures situated in a symbiotic relationship with nature." Wildcat posits that the mother tongue of Earth through which her message is delivered is best understood through many dialects known by Indigenous peoples:
Indigenous peoples have paid attention to our Mother Earth, it is important to listen to what we can share with humankind. These knowledges are bound in unique lifeways - customs, habits, behaviors, material and symbolic features of culture emergent from the land and sea - and therefore have practical implications for those of humankind wanting to cooperatively and sustainably live with a place as opposed to at an address.[5]
Technical
- Wiki projects
- Open access journals
- Data sharing requirements
- Open-source software
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is an open-source, free software development platform and community which is used to design and host the majority of Wiki projects online, including Climate Wiki. Its initial development was driven by its use for the largest and best-known Wiki, Wikipedia. Its use for both the largest knowledge commons website (Wikipedia), facilitation of interoperability and collaboration across Wikis, and support for decentralized networks makes it a pivotal technology for constructing digital knowledge commons.
Wikimedia
The Wikimedia family of projects are hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks.
The Wikimedia Commons consists of over 90,000,000 freely usable files in an open contribution repository which are used across these websites and in other Wiki projects.[6]
Wikipedia has a short page on the "knowledge commons"[7], and the term appears in 54 articles[8] and 86 ancillary pages.[9]
P2P Foundation
The P2P Foundation hosts a Wiki which supports a more developed page than Wikipedia's on knowledge commons [10], and devotes considerably more thought (in absolute but especially relative terms) to it with 326 articles using the concept.[11]
Scaling Climate Goals
On April 22, 2022 the T7 Task Force Climate and Environment advocated for a “Digital Technical Knowledge Commons” ‘housing all things technical’ and data, especially:
1. monitoring data;
2. contextualized technology-based solutions, and;
3. best practices, relevant to climate change-related goals and sharing this accessible technical knowledge, information and expertise with decision-makers and stakeholders locally, regionally, and globally.[12]
While this report showed a recognition of the need for a climate knowledge commons by an official international task-force with considerable influence, it failed to address any social factors or even recognize, let alone center, the issue of climate justice - a major difference from the emphasis and design of Climate Wiki.
Academic Conferences
Knowledge Commons Virtual Conference: https://2021knowledge.iasc-commons.org/
Sources
- ↑ Daniel R Wildcat, Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, 2009, p. 48
- ↑ Daniel R Wildcat, Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, 2009, p. 54
- ↑ Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind—Understanding the Threats to Biological and Cultural Diversity. Indian Journal of Public Administration, 39(3), 237–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019556119930304
- ↑ Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind—Understanding the Threats to Biological and Cultural Diversity. Indian Journal of Public Administration, 39(3), 237–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019556119930304
- ↑ Daniel R Wildcat, Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, 2009, p. 10-17
- ↑ https://commons.wikimedia.org
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_commons
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?fulltext=1&search=%22knowledge%20commons%22&title=Special%3ASearch&ns0=1
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%22knowledge+commons%22&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns1=1&ns2=1&ns3=1&ns4=1&ns5=1&ns8=1&ns9=1&ns10=1&ns11=1&ns12=1&ns13=1&ns14=1&ns15=1&ns100=1&ns101=1&ns118=1&ns119=1&ns710=1&ns711=1&ns828=1&ns829=1&ns2300=1&ns2301=1&ns2302=1&ns2303=1
- ↑ https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Knowledge_Commons
- ↑ https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?search=%22knowledge+commons%22&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go&fulltext=1
- ↑ "SCALING CLIMATE GOALS THROUGH THE USE OF TECHNICAL EXPERTS & DIGITAL TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE COMMONS" T7 Task Force Climate and Environment, Maike Luiken & Alpesh Shah, April 22, 2022 https://www.think7.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Climate_Scaling-Climate-Goals-through-the-use-of-technical-experts-Digital-technical-knowledge-commons_Luken_Shah.pdf