[STS-Africa] June 6 Community Call: “What does flourishing look like for scientific communities and discoveries? Commons, Salons and Flourishing Studies”

[SEEKCommons Project]

Dear Colleagues,
On behalf of the SEEKCommons Project, which is funded by the U.S. 
National Science Foundation (NSF), we would like to invite you to our 
next community call:
Friday, June 6
6:00 p.m. CET / 12:00 p.m. EST / 9:00 a.m. PST
Via Zoom


In NSF SEEKCommons, we work in a distributed network of STS researchers, 
OS practitioners, and socio-environmental researchers to promote science 
and technology commons for participative socio-environmental research. 
Our call series offers an opportunity to discuss the possibilities of 
the commons as a governance framework, with speakers presenting on its 
challenges, benefits, lessons learned, and the uncharted possibilities 
for “open technologies.”

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FRI 6 JUN 2025 - 6:00 PM (CET) / 12:00 PM (EST) / 9:00 AM (PST)
— - — - — - —
This month’s Community Call topic:
“What does flourishing look like for scientific communities and 
discoveries? Commons, Salons and Flourishing Studies” with Ryan 
McGranaghan

What does flourishing look like for scientists, science communities, and 
society at large? Flourishing certainly involves pushing the frontiers 
of scientific discovery - frontiers that increasingly lie at the 
intersections of disciplines, communities, and worldviews. Meeting these 
challenges demands not only new technical approaches from data science 
and open science, but also new modes of collaboration, stewardship, and 
care. These are fundamentally socio-technical questions, and they 
require us to rethink how we build science together. The idea of the 
commons offers a powerful lens through which to understand - and 
reimagine - our current struggles around data , knowledge, and 
collaboration. While the theory and practice of "knowledge commons" is 
still emerging, it provides language and structure to ask key questions: 
Who participates in knowledge creation? What values underlie our 
infrastructures? How do we govern and steward these shared spaces? In 
this talk, the speaker will share how they are attempting to build 
knowledge commons within NASA science, through efforts in knowledge 
representation and community interactions, altogether in an ethos of 
open science. So, it will, in part, be about the nuanced, messy, ongoing 
work of building knowledge infrastructure and knowledge communities. But 
the commons is more than infrastructure - it also prompts a deeper, 
collective question: What are we to and for each other, as scientists 
for, co-creators of, and participants in society? In the second half of 
the talk, the speaker will invite us to explore the emerging terrain of 
flourishing as a dimension of science. We will explore the landscape of 
what flourishing looks like in the realm of scholarship and spark 
conversation towards a (new) field of flourishing studies. This is an 
immense topic, worth holding in many hands. So, this talk will 
ultimately be a call toward collaboration and collectivity, and the 
speaker will close by sharing structures they have created to explore 
flourishing.


The series is open to public participation, and registration is 
required: https://bit.ly/3YQBcPf
Complete details can be found in our June 6 Community Call Flyer: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T1DTqn8agLQcY04VM2evznPU3-Cgx57C/view


For more info about the series, visit: 
https://seekcommons.org/community-calls.html
We hope you can join us!

Warm regards,
The NSF SEEKCommons Project
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