Crowdsourcing, commons and wiki-communities

I am currently grappling with issues of open data, crowdsourcing and the ideas of commons. Working with Mari Runardottir and Christina Mörtberg and they have a really interesting case from Swedish archives and how the open data directive is causing trouble for archivists. It is really interesting to think about the tensions archivist experience – in relation to the tensions I have observed in the wiki-community of locla historians here in Norway. Both groups are concerned about the same matters: their knowledge infrastructures and practice differ. Archivists have traditionally concentrated on institutional processes of collecting, preservation, safeguarding and dissemination of historical material, their point of departure is the archive as a repository. The local history community, on the other hand, work with engagements in interpretations and re-presentations of archival material in physical publications. We study how people working with archival and local history activities imagine potential futures for the norms, practices and routines that they share presently, when working to realize the future open and participatory cultural heritage. This implies our understanding of knowledge infrastructuring as including imaginations of future technology that deeply influence peoples making and practicing in infrastructuring processes. Thus, we ask what attachment do people in cultural heritage institutions have to infrastructures of digital heritage participation and open data? How are these related to existing knowledge practices? And how do these attachments create tension in knowledge infrastructuring process?