Conference Agenda
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Workshop 7 / Track B: Shared Commons and the Viability of Engaged Research Platforms
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Does It Pay to Participate? A Live Mutual Learning Workshop on the Viability and Vulnerabilities of an Engaged Research Shared Commons Platform 1University College Cork, Ireland (UCC); 2Universitat de Girona, Spain; 3Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; 4Institute for the Development of Education, Croatia; 5University of Rijeka, Croatia The ENGAGE Commons (engage.curricula.dev) is a discovery layer built at UCC as part of SPACE WP4. In the sixfold helix model, infrastructure platforms are themselves the sixth helix, alongside academia, industry, government, civil society, and the natural environment (Brodny & Tutak, 2025). The platform helps these actors find each other, see who has worked on similar questions, and ground new projects in shared bibliography and case studies. ENGAGE connects people. It does not generate funded posts, fix ethics review backlogs, or pay community partners' time. The platform rests on a hypothesis. Community contribution to a shared commons saves more time across the field than it costs the contributor. If a researcher spends four hours writing a case study so the next ten do not start from zero, the time-economy is regenerative. If those four hours cost more than they save, the commons extracts from its contributors and fails on its own ethical terms. We do not yet know which way it goes. The platform is in pilot. Staff time runs through the SPACE Erasmus+ project, which closes in 2026. The financial pressures behind every CE infrastructure are similar: project cycles, soft money, the unpaid hours of community partners. The default assumption that contribution to a commons is regenerative deserves more scrutiny than the field tends to give it (Ostrom, 1990). This workshop puts the hypothesis in front of the room: - 10 min. Walk-through of ENGAGE as built. How it works, what contributors are asked to give. - 15 min. The viability claim with caveats. We name why the time-economy is the binding constraint, where similar commons hold up, and where others collapse. - 35 min. Live MLE. Small groups map their institution's CE time-budget across four roles: academic, community partner, support staff, student. They surface where contribution to the commons would pay back, where it extracts, and what conditions would make the regenerative claim hold. - 20 min. Plenary synthesis. Each group reports two findings and one design implication for engagement infrastructure. - 10 min. What changes about ENGAGE and about other CE commons as a result of this room. The workshop offers participants a working tool to take home, a structured method for examining their own engagement infrastructure, and a chance to shape a platform under construction. It also tests a claim the open-research commons movement asserts without examining (Fecher & Friesike, 2014). | |