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When shouldn’t you use participatory grant making?

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When shouldn’t you use participatory grant making?

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https://hannah-paterson.medium.com/when-shouldnt-you-use-participatory-grant-making-6a1863214756

Participatory grantmaking (PGM) can be a powerful tool for equity and community engagement, but it's not always the right fit. It may not be suitable in urgent funding situations where speed is critical, when it's poorly designed or tokenistic, when communities lack the expertise to make informed decisions, or when they don’t have visibility into the broader system impacts of those decisions. To be effective, PGM must be thoughtfully implemented with clear roles, adequate support, and trust-based practices that prioritize transparency, accountability, and shared learning throughout the grantmaking process.

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When shouldn’t you use participatory grant making?

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As you can tell from this report and the work I’ve been involved in, I’m a big advocate for participatory grant making (PGM). I think…

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This playbook offers a detailed roadmap for operationalizing participatory data stewardship—a model of data governance that centers community agency, rights, and benefit-sharing across key sectors: environment, healthcare, and urban governance.

It builds on Elinor Ostrom’s commons-based governance and explores how communities can co-govern data throughout its lifecycle—not just consent to its use. Aapti emphasizes that true participation goes beyond tokenism, requiring tailored strategies, infrastructure, and policy support.

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Executive Summary

In 2020, Aapti released a report that set out a taxonomy of data stewardship, a paradigm of data governance that seeks to centre individuals and communities in the collection, usage and sharing of data. The discourse of data stewardship we've been building on since then has put forward frameworks and best practices for how intermediary entities can support individuals and communities in deriving value from data - to empower, advocate for and serve as a tool for negotiating and accessing rights - both online and offline.

While stewardship has since gained significant traction (particularly models like data trusts and data cooperatives) from researchers, policymakers and practitioners alike, it is still characterised as an emerging field.

This calls for greater focus on unpacking how stewardship may be best translated into practice. Our Stewardship Navigator tool attempted to address this in part - and sought to provide stewards or steward-like initiatives with a set of questions and possible design choices to consider.

After the release of this tool, however, we learned that many of these choices are influenced and predicated on sector-specific nuances, requirements and realities. We understand that the aspiration of building participatory data governance systems is critical to pursue, but the contours of what participatory stewardship is and is not for different stakeholders, and how participation can be actualised needs to be understood further.

Based on our research over the last three years, even considering plurality across steward model types, shaping responsible data governance requires careful designing and strategizing on multiple levels - technical, community, policy and partnerships. Further, defining pathways, degrees and mechanisms to enable participation also vary, with certain domain-specific examples providing blueprints for civil society and the public sector to uphold participatory ethics. As data privacy and governance frameworks evolve globally, there is a need to situate the role of a steward and understand what needs to be put in place to create responsive regulation. There is a need to diagnose how various stakeholders intersect and what their roles may be in the ecosystem.

To deepen our insights and recommendations, we also chose to identify key sectors where stewardship may prove to be most actionable and valuable:

How to read this Document

The Introduction section provides a general overview of the concept of data stewardship, the notion of participation in data governance, and the aim behind drawing up this playbook. There are also introductions for each of the three sectors which delineate the value proposition of participatory mechanisms for data governance within that sector with an examination of the overarching concerns in the governance of that sector.

As there is a set of Plays that are sector-agnostic, as well as Plays for each of the three sectors, along with a number of challenges and strategies within each Play, we have used the following set of codes for easy reference inside and across Plays, Challenges and Strategies in each sector.

Each Challenge will be represented by a 3-character code, where the first character refers to the relevant sector, the second refers to the Play number, and the third refers to the challenge number.
For example: Challenge h2.3 refers to Health Sector, Play 2, Challenge 3

Similarly, each Strategy will be represented by a 4-character code, where the first character refers to the relevant sector, the second refers to the Play number, the third refers to the challenge number and the fourth refers to the strategy.
For example: Strategy h 2.3.1 refers to Health Sector, Play 2, Challenge 3, Strategy 1

The table below sets out what strategies are relevant to which category of stakeholder.

Introduction

In the current data economy, the ability for individuals and communities to participate seems to be both narrowly defined and limited in application. This situation is further complicated by varying expressions of digital rights across jurisdictions and conceptualizations of where individuals fit into the vast patchwork of data fiduciaries, intermediaries and regulators.

At an individual level, most of us are familiar with exercising 'choice' in the data economy through the provision of consent - a process that has been criticized as broken and not extensive enough. Moreover, the role of individuals and communities - the primary producers of data - are largely rendered invisible, affording limited control over the use of their data by public agencies and private entities alike.

However, it is important to acknowledge that there is collective societal value that can be unlocked with data, and central to this unlocking is the meaningful participation of individuals and communities in data governance, in a way that goes beyond notice and consent mechanisms. Yet, several barriers impede how participation can be defined, incentivized and scaled in the broader stewardship ecosystem.

Solving for these issues requires both an acknowledgement that current systems effectively stymie substantive participation and a deeper investigation of what practices can be drawn from historical and contemporary modes of community mobilisation to define new conceptions, modalities and pathways for participation.

What can participation look like in the data economy and what existing literature and use cases demonstrate a promising path forward?

Participation - a foundational pillar of data stewardship

This course of inquiry finds resonance in the evolving discourse around data stewardship which pushes for a more agential and equitable approach to participating in the data economy. It imagines a more just ecosystem that enables individuals and communities to exercise their data rights in accordance with their respective data priorities while ensuring necessary safeguards are in place for the protection of their privacy as well as rights over their data.

Data stewardship's participatory ethics finds its genesis in Elinor Ostrom's design principles for community-led governance of commons - which presents a third avenue that exists beyond the state and private sector - to effectively manage the utilisation of resources at the level of communities. This framework has also been historically reflected in the governance of common resources including the management of ecological services and pooled goods like the oceans and atmosphere. A significant artifice of her work is the relational nature of common pool resources, highlighting the interconnectedness of the commons, communities and livelihoods that determine how resources are governed and how members of the community participate in such governance processes.

Participatory data stewardship similarly furnishes a spectrum of participation for communities to be involved in the use of

their data. It can help ensure that communities are involved in decision-making processes throughout the lifecycle of data - from its collection through to its processing, storage and sharing to eventual deletion. Sherry Arnstein's 'ladder of citizen participation', can be used to diagnose the current data governance practices as low levels of participation, and point towards the many possibilities data stewardship provides to enhance participation. This framework adapted by the Ada Lovelace Institute for data stewardship, illustrated in the figure below, surfaces a useful starting point for community participation in data stewardship. Participatory data stewardship similarly furnishes a spectrum of participation for communities to be involved in the use of their data. It can help ensure that communities are involved in decision-making processes throughout the lifecycle of data - from its collection through to its processing, storage and sharing to eventual deletion. Sherry Arnstein's 'ladder of citizen participation', can be used to diagnose the current data governance practices as low levels of participation, and point towards the many possibilities data stewardship provides to enhance participation. This framework is adapted by the Ada Lovelace Institute for data stewardship as well, illustrated in the figure below, surfaces a useful starting point for community participation in data stewardship.

Environment & Sustainability

Climate change has profoundly impacted the health of the planet, threatening the loss of biodiversity and irreversible harm to the air and oceans - all common resources. The crisis has been further exacerbated by limited and poor understanding of data which has in turn obscured the understanding of human impact on the climate and the vulnerabilities it produces for marginalised communities. For instance, the Koli community, a traditional small-scale fishing community in Mumbai, have pointed towards a lack of substantive traditional ecological knowledge in guiding climate mitigation policies. This community is not only disproportionately impacted by climate risks resulting in shrinking fish catches, but their livelihoods are also threatened by development/infrastructure projects.

In order to understand the impact of climate change on marginalised communities, it is necessary to have environmental data which is inclusive of substantive traditional knowledge. Environmental data has become central to bottom-up movements which prioritise the participation of local communities in development initiatives and enables them to set their own goals. Advancement in data analysis and data gathering technologies have also expanded the potential of collection and sharing of environmental data. Tools developed such as Mapeo (developed by organisations Digital Democracy) have been useful in the collection and sharing of environmental data and building biodiversity science that is informed by bottom-up community knowledge and involvement.

Though promising, tools like these are exceptions within a data economy where ultimate control over data is largely concentrated by state and private actors - often with minimal accountability - increasing the scope for misuse. Weaponization or manipulation of environmental data has systematically undermined conservation efforts as well as the rights of indigenous communities. The actions of the WHO in deleting India's air pollution data from its portal is one such instance where data misuse has stymied transparency and climate mitigation efforts.
Challenges with accessing environmental data & consequent impact
It is often the least well-resourced actors who stand to suffer most from climate change (with actors in the Global South being particularly vulnerable). This is further exacerbated by digital transformation-related solutions which may deepen inequities. Increasingly, it is becoming evident that the loss of agency around data and information that relates to common pool resources (such as water bodies and forests) can have a knockon effect around conservation efforts and is also beginning to impact the livelihood of marginalized communities.

At the core of this exists a fundamental challenge in the management of public resources. The current state of overexploitation - resulting in a pillage of the commons - stands opposed to the long-standing traditions of natural preservation and a delicate ecological equilibrium which indigenous communities have successfully maintained. Prioritising a return to community-oriented modes for governance of natural resources will be necessary, given that ongoing digitisation processes threaten to amplify existing environmental injustices.

Mainstream environmental policies and interventions have also failed to acknowledge the unique role indigenous communities can play in stewarding the earth's natural resources. Studies have shown that community led protection of diversity results in better conservation of the environment. The Namibian government recognised community-based natural resource management of 82 conservancies covering about 20% of the country's surface. These initiatives resulted in improved living conditions of local communities while also restoring animal populations. However, it is also important to note that it is now indigenous and marginalised communities who face the greatest degree of impact of climate risks - and bear the brunt of an ever increasing burden of pollution. The added burden that may be imposed by stewarding these resources today must be matched with adequate support from the entities responsible for pollution.

Relatedly, technocratic decisions, the enforcement of which is entrusted unto experts and bureaucrats, are often at odds with the decision-making processes within local communities. This reflects quite clearly in the impact of digitisation of land records under the Bhoomi program in Bangalore, where as a consequence of this program, corruption increased and relatedly so did costs for farmers. Instead, the e-governance scheme enabled efficient corporate capture of land for developers and prioritised the interests of IT companies.
Existing pathways to environmental justice that can inform participatory and community-oriented governance
Elinor Ostrom's work demonstrates how communities can forge a framework to govern their common resources in a mutually beneficial and sustainable manner. Ostrom draws from a rich history of community-initiatives and organisations which have driven development efforts in aid of natural resource management. One such initiative is the incorporation of the concept of ' buen vivir ' undertaken by some Latin American countries. Buen vivir is based on the belief that true well-being is only possible as part of a community. Buen vivir began to grow in popularity in Latin America in response to depletion of natural resources, climate change and the necessity of developing an alternative to a model of economic development informed primarily by the experience of the Global North.

Similarly, the Maine Lobster Fishery is credited for its steady yield and sustainable growth for many decades due to the lobster fishers' community who monitor their livelihoods through an informal process of control, mutually negotiated rules for resource extraction and territorial governance. Elsewhere, the Gond Tribe in Mendha in the district of Maharashtra has been recognized for its movement towards self-rule and forest conservation. One of the most significant actions that the villagers took was declaring the land in the village as village commons under India's Forest Rights Act, 2006. Considered an empirical experiment, Mendha Lekha has since demonstrated a positive ecological impact on its village ecosystem and economy that is guided by a participatory resource governance system, ethics of consensus and inclusion.

Building on Ostrom's work, Frischmann developed the Knowledge Commons framework specifically tailored to the properties that distinguish knowledge from natural resources. The framework refers to knowledge as a broad set of intellectual and cultural resources which includes group information, science, knowledge, creative works and data. Frischmann's framework puts special emphasis on managing rival resources within a knowledge common since shared resources may not be fully independent to other resources. This flexibility within the knowledge commons approach has the advantage of encompassing a wider range of interests than a private right.

Knowledge commons have existed and continue to in various countries. Indigenous communities within Australia, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia have developed a database including information like recording animal and plant behaviour to historical observations on biological or physical factors in climate events. This database follows strict guidelines on ability to be operated smoothly in environments with limited technical expertise, ease of use, free and open source software, respecting cultural sensitivities, portability and sustainability. This approach on commons has many lessons for data, especially as we begin to think of it as a collective/community resource and not just an individual one.
The role of stewardship in institutionalising community-governance over resources and related data/information
Discourse on environmental stewardship and biocultural rights are also closely tied to environmental justice and collective governance. These can be similarly drawn from while building blueprints to translate stewardship into action in the environmental domain.

This requires recognizing the degree to which vulnerable and marginalised communities are disproportionately affected by climate risks. The tenets of the environmental justice movement embed ethics of procedural and distributive justice alongside a recognition of communities' rights to self-determination. These principles find resonance within contemporary discourse on data justice. For instance, Taylor's framework for data justice is based on three pillars: visibility, digital (dis)engagement and countering data-driven discrimination. The first pillar deals with both privacy and representation. The second pillar deals with freedom to control the terms of one's engagement with data markets focussed on potential benefits to low-income communities. The third pillar is power to identify and challenge bias in data use and freedom to not be discriminated against.

Building on data justice work and proposing solutions on social asymmetries and injustice, data stewardship has been proposed as a solution to monitoring data, inclusion of marginalised communities, contextualising tech-based solutions and tackling climate change. Data stewardship will be relevant to climate-related goals and for sharing technical knowledge and information with decision makers and stakeholders locally, regionally and globally.

Stewardship can be imagined and implemented in a variety of forms - one thread of this development is focused on indigenous data sovereignty. Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS) has been defined as "indigenous people's rights to control data from and about their communities and lands, articulating both individual and collective rights to data access and privacy." Some projects aiming to improve environmental stewardship have embraced IDS principles. For example, in Canada, the Arctic Eider Society is developing a platform to study ice-monitoring which is conceived as an instrument to empower indigenous self-determination. The platform's privacy features include an option to assign indigenous stewardship to user content, giving granular data access to specific communities, regional, and other affiliated local organisations.

These various bodies of research and practice around the community and collective governance of resources are necessary to continue unravelling. They provide significant grounding for designing pathways for greater control and participation in data decision-making for indigenous communities. Similarly, it may help situate the role, responsibilities and related requirements data stewards may have for empowering indigenous people in their digital lives.

Considering existing discourse and our learnings on stewardship, we believe that the environment sector is ripe for collective action on data through models of stewardship. Therefore, this playbook provides a set of emerging strategies for stakeholders to help address challenges that emerge from enacting stewardship in the environment sector.

Healthcare

Data-driven innovation bears immense potential to fundamentally transform healthcare, expanding the scope for precision treatment, research and drug development as well as effective and timely public health surveillance. Such innovation constituted the heart of public response to the pandemic - from using data to guide healthcare policy decisions, support isolation and contact tracing, track infection and disease incidence to fast-track vaccine formulations.

Specifically, health data governance refers to the management and oversight of the collection, storage, use, and sharing of health-related information. It plays a crucial role in ensuring that patient rights, public health benefits, and ethical considerations are respected and upheld. The governance of health data must balance the need to protect patients' privacy and confidentiality while opening up the use of data for further research. The overarching aim of health data governance is essential for maintaining the trust of patients and the public while also advancing medical research and public health outcomes.

Patient rights over health data

The first generation of health data regulations sought to prevent harms from data misuse and made individual patients the node of their frameworks. This includes the emergence of legislations such as the the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, 1996 (HIPAA), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, 2004 and the host of provincial health regulations it spawned across Canada, as well as data protection legislations such as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, 2018, Kenya and Ghana 's Data Protection Acts, among others.

However, such an individualistic approach to health data regulation, one that is essentially anchored in consent provisioning, is manifestly inadequate against a backdrop of growing digitisation of health services. For one, scholars have drawn attention to the limits of individual privacy self management that prevent patients from providing informed consent and exercising meaningful control over downstream uses of their health data. Two, the emergence of big data analytics and the application of newer technologies such as artificial intelligence to health information processing has rendered mass aggregation of datasets plausible, widening the power asymmetry between patients and data processing entities. Third, aggregation lends itself to data processing that can manifest as collective harms, necessitating newer conceptions of data rights that inscribe elements of collective governance within frameworks for health data regulation.

With the evolution of data privacy and protection legislations globally, there is a pronounced need to embed provisions for collective governance and oversight of health data use by providers, private entities such as pharmaceutical companies and public bodies that process health data. Solidarity-based systems for data governance offer a new pathway to reimagine health data regulation towards plural futures that are sensitive to ethics of community participation and fair distribution of collective benefits from health data use. This renewed conception of health data regulation that can push for and build on partnerships amongst various stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem - patients, providers, researchers and policymakers - to ensure that health data is leveraged responsibly and founded in respect for patients' rights.

Public health priorities

Public health institutions steward vast troves of health data (ex: census data, national health surveys) that when safely unlocked can inform myriad policy decisions and medical research. However, the ability to process this health information hinges on granting access to third parties that may include a variety of stakeholders such as academia, non-profit organisations and private companies. Such data sharing agreements are seldom straightforward, often producing contentious trade offs that undermine trust in public institutions to deliver fair and equitable health outcomes to patients at large.

There exist several documented examples of contentious data sharing arrangements that produced mass public outrage, forcing governments to either altogether reconsider their proposals or seek refuge in questionable legal exemptions during health exigencies. Successive NHS data sharing agreements with private companies like DeepMind, Palantir and Amazon constitute instances of data sharing by public health agencies that were censured widely. Elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic morphed into a hotbed of rampant privacy violations wherein governments circumvented legislations to implement mass contact-tracing with overbroad provisions to collect citizens' data, as demonstrated through India's Arogya Setu and Singapore's TraceTogether applications.

While it is undeniable that data sharing by public agencies can advance collective health outcomes, it is also fraught with concerns around patient privacy and regulatory ambiguity. Thus it is imperative to conceive of mechanisms that open data collected by public health institutions in ways that enhance social welfare without undermining trust and patient rights over data. Frameworks for attaining social licences - informal systems of allowances and permissions granted to public authorities and corporations to perform activities that generate public value - can help reimagine health data sharing agreements that manifestly privilege social welfare. Specifically, scholars characterise three elements, in the context of health data sharing for COVID-19 surveillance, that are critical to achieve trustworthiness and hence, social licence for public action - compliance with data privacy legislations, adhere to transparency through forward looking data governance rules, and continuous commitment to public involvement throughout the lifecycle of data use.

In foregrounding transparency and public participation as crucial artefacts, regimes of social licensing help enhance community trust and legitimacy for processes of health data sharing. As also, social licensing surfaces an alternative normative blueprint to reconstitute power relationships between individual patients and patient groups on the one hand, and public health authorities that continue to collect and amass valuable data that can produce sound policy decisions.

Ethics of monetising health data

Monetisation of health data has been touted as the next frontier of innovation within digitised health systems, with corporations and scholars alike calling for formulating frameworks of data ownership that can be accorded to individuals. Ownership herein refers to an approach to data regulation, particularly health data, with its genesis in the political economy of property rights. An analogous regime for data would imply that individuals have "ownership" over their data that is not dissimilar to owning property such as land, houses, etc. While the approach may seem intuitive and compelling, it is riddled with myriad conceptual and ethical quandaries.

For one, data is not a static economic resource that can be valued precisely and traded in exchange for money or services. In contrast, scholars have drawn attention to the dynamic, nonrivalrous and relational nature of data that lends itself to use and re-use by a variety of data users and custodians, even after individuals and communities have parted with said data. Second, ownership approaches to data regulation risk commodifying privacy in ways that are untenable with contemporary human rights jurisprudence that has come to regard privacy as an inalienable right. Alternatively, a decisional autonomy conception of data regulation - one in which individuals and communities are accorded a regime of rights to lay claims over their data - is preferred inasmuch as it recognises the role of individuals and communities in data production, creating pathways for their engagement in data governance decisions.

Lastly, data monetisation in the context of healthcare carries with it risks of creating unfair dependencies on income earned by selling data, exacerbation of income inequities, reduced accuracy of datasets and lastly, waning altruistic data sharing for public benefit. Further, prevailing logics of Big Data demonstrate that data and knowledge production occur at a societal level, producing both collective benefits and harms. In such a context, it is ill-advised to offer data monetisation as an incentive to individuals when they are impacted by their own data as well as that of others in ways that possibly magnify discrimination and bias. Instead, policymakers would benefit from recognizing the limits of existing individualised data protection legislations and move towards a conceptual framework for data governance that focalises collective privacy and data rights as the foundation for future regulation.

Role of data stewardship in health data governance

Given these risks, data stewardship presents an optimal vehicle to realise the underlying need for holistic frameworks of patient rights and, more broadly, the need for community participation in health data governance. Our research on various modes of community-oriented data governance, and bottom-up models like data stewardship has presented healthcare as not only a priority sector, but one with significant room for public engagement.

Stewards and steward-like initiatives often function as conduits to build trust, and provide communities a degree of collective leverage. In public health policy making, bolstering community engagement and trust is essential to work toward social licensing regimes. In the context of data monetisation, stewardship can help realise data rights in a meaningful manner, acting as a community-centric accountability layer as well as including individuals and groups in defining value generation and distribution. This presents great potential to avoid unfair practices and harms like exclusion, bias and the perpetuation of legacy inequalities.

We have highlighted key challenges that plague the instantiation of meaningful participation in health data governance and patient rights. Based on numerous global case studies, we find that for each stakeholder in this interconnected ecosystem, there are valuable strategies and strengths that situate data stewardship as an institutional framework: one that can have many forms, but ultimately creates a site to anchor these concerns and contemplate renewed approaches to health data governance.

Urban Governance

While information has always played an integral role in urban governance, rapid advancements in digital technologies and computation have spurred a transformation in urban governance. New and emerging technologies, catalysed by the availability of large volumes of data are enabling the rapid digitisation and innovation in the domain of urban governance, which can be understood as the " many ways in which individuals and institutions, both public and private, plan and manage the common affairs of the city ".

Data innovations and new models of reconciling diverse forms of information have been the cornerstone of these transformation efforts. These approaches range from the creation of 'digital twins' for cities, a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object, building collaborative and open digital platforms that afford easy integration with services, or supporting ecosystems that foster innovation around specific use-cases like mobility as a service. Governments are now invested in leveraging data to shape accessible, people-centric, sustainable 'smart cities'. These efforts have transformed the governance of urban spaces and cemented the criticality of data to urban governance.

However, much like most other sectors witnessing a digital transformation, ultimate control over the data lifecycle - from collection to processing - is largely concentrated by state and private actors. In addition to this, processes of decision making based on this data are also exclusionary, leading to decisions that are not always aligned to the on-ground needs of communities. Despite urban governance being an area where the daily lived experiences of people are most directly impacted, there exists little visibility, agency and participation for communities.

Urban data governance to address legacy inequalities

Numerous studies have highlighted systemic inequities across the world in the design of urban spaces and allocation and quality of resources. Areas populated by marginalised communities tend to have poorer quality of basic resources, be it air, water or roads. Moreover, investment in public spaces in such areas is typically lower, and connectivity between these areas and central business districts is also more problematic.

Access to quality housing in urban spaces is also predicated on historical inequities, with housing crises being more of a result of unequal distribution of resources, rather than a complete scarcity of them. In the digital sphere, some jurisdictions have also reported areas with marginalised populations being quoted higher prices for basic digital infrastructure such as internet connectivity. In a highly digitised world, this has knock-on effects on matters from education to finding new jobs.

Historical inequities in urban design also typically put a higher burden on marginalised communities. People from marginalised communities typically spend more time commuting to their places of work, which affects their health and wellbeing. In the United States, neighbourhoods with a predominance of blackowned businesses also received less benefits from relief efforts on average.

Urban data governance presents an opportunity to address these existing, systemic inequities. By leveraging the power of data, urban spaces can be better designed to rebalance the issues caused due to systemic problems. Significantly, in addition to retroactively addressing inequities, data-enabled insights can also be used to proactively build new systems that rebalance and democratise urban spaces.

Redefining the centrality of the State

Historically, the State has typically stewarded urban areas, as the primary builder and holder of urban spaces - be it through municipal authorities or public utility corporations. Resultantly, urban spaces have been designed largely in accordance with the dictates of the State, with communities' participation limited more to submitting proposals and providing comments and feedback on public efforts and policies.

The integration of data into decision making for more informed urban governance provides an opportunity to reframe this paradigm. Crucially, data promises greater buy-in and participation for citizens and communities in the governance of their urban spaces - giving them a greater say in how the governance of cities can be reflective of their needs and concerns. This greater involvement and agency of communities in data-enabled urban governance runs across the entire cycle of governance - from data collection to planning to implementation.

This theoretical promise however has not adequately translated into practice. Despite many smart city endeavours attempting to embed participation into the design and implementation of their processes, community participation in urban governance continues to be broken and insufficient. The State continues to dominate the stewarding of urban areas, with data sources that inform decision making, still largely lying in the domain of public sector data or private industry data.

The centrality of community interest to urban data governance

Non-personal data plays the foremost role in urban data governance. This non-personal data can be both personaladjacent, in that it is aggregated and anonymised personal data, as well as data not tied to personal data at all - data about water or air quality, for example. Regardless of the linkages to personal data, almost all data used for urban governance is closely related to communities in terms of the direct, vast impact it has on their lived experiences and the insights it provides about them. Analysis of air quality data from three major cities in Canada (Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver) showed that indigenous, low-income and immigrant residents are exposed to higher cumulative air pollution. Similarly, studies in the US, Asia and Africa, revealed that communities with lower socioeconomic status faced higher levels of air pollution. Likewise, mobility data can provide important insights into trends on preferred modes of transportation, movement timings and movement patterns - all linked to communities.

Despite the availability of such data and insights from it, communities typically do not have access to such data or even have a say in the collection of the same. This can have a direct impact on a community's ability to push for urban policies that can address issues surfaced by this data. On the flip side, exclusion of communities from the data gathering stage can also invisibilise communities and the issues they face at a policy making stage. It therefore becomes crucial to recognise the interest of communities in data that is reflective of / linked to them.

Data stewardship as a means of fostering participatory urban data governance

Frameworks for data sharing should be citizen-centric, enabling them to have greater control over data collection and sharing processes. While data enabled urban governance has immense potential, there are several barriers that impede this process. In addition to the lack of community participation in the process there are also issues of data being held in private silos, a lack of technical standards, and privacy concerns from data sharing.

Typically, in conjunction with smart city initiatives, several governments have adopted open data platforms and published open datasets. This is seen as an increasingly attractive datasharing model which, though meriting encouragement, is limited in scope. Yu and Robinson (2012) argue that open government and open data cannot be conflated and that often the success of open data initiatives is dependent on the consistency of public policies that may shift according to the whims of administrations. Also, as these are government-led, there are no guarantees of the quality or accuracy of the data shared.

While some of these open data-sharing initiatives are designed to be collaborative and engage stakeholders and data-users throughout the process, other models do not take into account the usability of the data released. There is also a lack of trust between the various stakeholders involved in urban data governance. Without collaboration with these players and access Frameworks for data sharing should be citizen-centric, enabling them to have greater control over data collection and sharing processes. While data enabled urban governance has immense potential, there are several barriers that impede this process. In addition to the lack of community participation in the process there are also issues of data being held in private silos, a lack of technical standards, and privacy concerns from data sharing.

Typically, in conjunction with smart city initiatives, several governments have adopted open data platforms and published open datasets. This is seen as an increasingly attractive datasharing model which, though meriting encouragement, is limited in scope. Yu and Robinson (2012) argue that open government and open data cannot be conflated and that often the success of open data initiatives is dependent on the consistency of public policies that may shift according to the whims of administrations. Also, as these are government-led, there are no guarantees of the quality or accuracy of the data shared.

The past few years have witnessed numerous instantiations of stewardship like initiatives. Urban Living Labs, for example, have emerged in many geographies as co-creative spaces to reconcile stakeholder groups and act as hubs for participatory processes to be built and deployed in real time. Additionally, multilateral and international institutions like the United Nations Development Programme are also supporting joint policy experimentation initiatives - Pulse Labs in Jakarta's and Pintig Lab in the Philippines are two such examples. There has also been buy-in from public sector entities, with efforts such as DECODE (piloted in Amsterdam and Barcelona), Adelaide's Smart City Studio, and the Houston Hackathon all exploring different modalities of involving communities more intimately in urban data governance.

Stewardship efforts, and more broadly stewardship as a concept, in the urban governance space remain relatively esoteric and face numerous challenges. This sectoral pull-out provides a set of emerging strategies for stakeholders to help address challenges to fostering data stewardship in the urban governance sector.

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Fostering Participatory Data Stewardship | Aapti Institute

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Executive Summary In 2020, Aapti released a report that set out a taxonomy of data stewardship, a paradigm of data governance that seeks to centre individuals and communities in the collection, usage and sharing of data. The discourse of data stewardship we've been building on since then has put forward frameworks and best practices for [...]

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Race After Technology (Polity) cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevole

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"Plural Funding (also known as Quadratic Funding or QF) is a more democratic and scalable form of matching funding for public goods, i.e. any projects valuable to large groups of people and accessible to the general public... Plural Funding optimizes matching funds by prioritizing projects based on the number of people who contributed. This way, funds meant to benefit the public go towards projects that really benefit a broad public, instead of things that only have a few wealthy backers... Plural Funding strongly encourages people to make contributions, no matter how small, and ensures a democratic allocation of funds meant to benefit the public."

see also: https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/papers/The_Handbook_for_Radical_Local_Democracy.pdf

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We are a community of activists, artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars committed to using mechanism design to inspire radical social change.

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The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols

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The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols

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Complex coordination problems have an air of doomed intractability about them. We speak in fatalistic terms of economics being a “dismal” science, of sociological phenomena being dominated by the “tragedy of the commons,” of organizations being hopelessly “captured,” and of complex problems being “wicked.” Even our simplest mental models of coordination and cooperation problems, such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma in game theory, are built around default expectations of obviously worse outcomes dominating obviously better ones, and worst-case behaviors driving systemic outcomes.

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The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols - Summer of Protocols

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In this pilot study, which served as the initial provocation for the Summer of Protocols, we aimed to capture the gist of the preliminary conversations that led to the program. We also aimed to establish a minimal common-ground foundation for program researchers, including a rough working definition of protocols, and an initial inventory

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"Why principles and not rules? Regulators have no choice but to make it up as they go along when coping with rapidly changing systems. Principles guide decisions without relying on rules that will be obsolete before their ink has dried. We should not expect perfection from principles – just better results than could be achieved with either fleetingly relevant rules, or giving regulators complete discretion.

Governance via principles applies not only to the internet, but to everything that it transforms. The Internet/web, in contrast to traditional media, is characterized by modularity rather than vertical integration; self-organization rather than rigid structures; and unpredictable metamorphosis rather than gradual evolution. It has transformed predictable, coordinated industries into highly fragmented, unpredictable ecosystems. A principles approach is therefore needed not only for the Internet/web, but for all parts of society that it transforms.

The creative wildness of the Internet is spreading to many previously staid fields of policy making; soon the forest management metaphor will be helpful beyond the narrow confines of the web."

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Internet Forestry: A Principles Approach to Governance | Publius Project

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Are forests governed tacitly or explicitly? In the woodland near my house, only the red alder knows how to make its leaves, and the red huckleberry and skunk cabbage pick their ideal spots without having to be told. The shrews and raccoons decide what to eat and when to breed. All the work of being a forest is done by its denizens, from the nematodes on up. And yet humans have had a hand here: broadening deer tracks into footpaths, clear-cutting old growth a hundred years ago, and deciding what to clear and what to keep after the 2002 windstorm.

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To revitalize democracy in the age of AI, we must pivot from one-way broadcasting to dynamic broad listening. Innovators in Taiwan and Japan are leading the way.

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For hope of democratic politics in the age of AI, East Asia is worth a closer look.

While most attention is on the declining cost of AI-generated misinformation and division-all the more so since DeepSeek shook the AI world-the focus in Tokyo and Taipei has turned to the similarly declining cost of AI-facilitated democratic participation.

Let's start with Tokyo's gubernatorial election last July. It was won by the incumbent, Koike Yuriko, but all the talk was about the runner-up, Ishimaru Shinji. Ishimaru was not backed by any political party, but he had 300,000 subscribers on YouTube. His success as an outsider, winning over 24 percent of the vote, was covered globally. Social media-fueled populism has finally reached Japan, said the headlines.

The headlines missed the much more promising story of another successful independent, Takahiro Anno, a 33-year-old AI engineer who placed fifth with 154,000 votes, or 2.3 percent. This was the most in Tokyo's history for a candidate under 40 years old, and the most for a candidate without any experience as an elected official.

The strategy behind Takahiro's campaign was the first of its kind: using cheap digital tools to facilitate a better two-way conversation at-scale between the candidate and citizens, or what can be called "broad listening" (the opposite of broadcasting). He the concept to the "inspiring" book, , written last year by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and dozens of other contributors. As it turns out, some of those contributors live in Tokyo, including Nishio Hirokazu, a software engineer and the book's Japanese translator. They all joined the campaign.

Together they built nothing less than a new state of the art of digital democracy. They visualized Tokyo's political discourse on social media using Talk to the City, and then used language models to facilitate healthy and productive online discussion about it. The outputs were used to continuously update Takahiro's policy agenda, which was posted on , where his supporters collaboratively made hundreds of issues, pull requests, and merged pull requests. Takahiro even used an avatar (an "AI Anno") to help communicate these updates to citizens. He credits the avatar with answering 8,600 questions over 16 days on a livestream, far more than Anno-san could have managed himself.

The process was made open-source and free for others to use, but there were some limitations. First, participating in the campaign required familiarity with technical systems like GitHub, which most people did not have. Takahiro was able to attract plenty of support from the kinds of people who naturally want to try out new technology, but that won't be enough for most political organizers. There is "tech debt" to be paid in order to make similar efforts easier and more cost-effective than conventional methods of mobilization. Second, it was set up more for one-to-one feedback than genuine group deliberation. As Audrey Tang said in conversation with Takahiro, "ChatGPT does not introduce you to new friends, or hold a conversation with 5 people at the same time."

Tang had these limitations in mind when she led a similar effort last spring with Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs. Seeking public opinion on various policies that would aim to promote the integrity of information on large platforms, the Ministry assembled nearly 450 individuals-a stratified random sample of some 200,000 citizens, who were contacted via the government's official "111" SMS code-into virtual rooms of 10.

Except the facilitator in these rooms was an AI system, rather than a paid professional. By most accounts it did an adequate job: encouraging everyone to speak, "de-duplicating" common discussion points, helping make sense of disagreement and where bridges to consensus might be made. And it did so, crucially, at a fraction of the cost of professional facilitation.

In the end, the of this "microcosm of Taiwan" helped shape the proposed Anti-Fraud Act, which the Legislative Yuan later passed into law. (The new law, among other things, mitigates online fraud in Taiwan by holding platforms liable if they serve any ads that use deepfakes and AI to scam users. In response, and have invested in infrastructure to verify the integrity of their ads with wide reach on the island.)

Not to be outdone, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government-led by Governor Koike who defeated Takahiro in the election- in November that they would work with Takahiro to make broad listening a constant force in Tokyo. They recently completed their first initiative, incorporating the voices of almost 28,000 citizens into an updated "Tokyo 2050" strategy.

Building on the success of broad listening, Takahiro now has plans to make Japan "the world's most advanced nation in digital democracy by 2030." Various political parties, in advance of this summer's elections in the House of Councillors and Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, appear to be getting on board. And it's clear why. In a moment of deep uncertainty for Japanese politics, broad listening is pointing the way to a more stable future.

But the same goes for the rest of the world. Weyl and Tang are calling for a new paradigm of "Prosocial Media," in which our algorithmic feeds start to surface content based on the principles of broad listening. As one example, Puja Ohlhaver, a core contributor to the Plurality book, has proposed extending the Community Notes feature on X into "community posts."

While Elon Musk imposes his vision of social media and government efficiency on the West, Takahiro, Tang and their many collaborators are quietly showing there is another, better way. It's time we all listen.

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To revitalize democracy in the age of AI, we must pivot from one-way broadcasting to dynamic broad listening. Innovators in Taiwan and Japan are leading the way.

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Community owned funds transforming food and agriculture

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Community owned funds transforming food and agriculture

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Through collective power, LIFE is driving transformative change to steward resources, build power, and advance justice and sustainability in the food and farm ecosystem.

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Home - Liberating Investment in the Food and Farm Ecosystem

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LIFE builds power to transform philanthropy and democratically redistribute funds towards efforts to relocalize our food system and cultivate resilient ecosystems.

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An exploration of emerginginnovation systems used byagricultural technology networks

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The Waterway Partnership - formed in 2023 by the NoRegrets Initiative and Manzanita Capital Collective - is shifting capital and power to Black, Indigenous, POC-led community-controlled funds and intermediaries focused on sustainable and regenerative food and agriculture, community ownership, and racial and economic justice.

To date, we have moved over $20 million to incredible organizations who, in turn, are moving loans and integrated capital on the ground.

We have created this site to share our learnings and contribute to the growing body of collective knowledge among funders, investors, investment advisors, and movement partners around community-controlled funds and alternatives to CDFIs, non-extractive finance, integrated capital, and shifting power in philanthropic and investor spaces.

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The Waterway Partnership - formed in 2023 by the NoRegrets Initiative and Manzanita Capital Collective - is shifting capital and power to Black, Indigenous, POC-led community-controlled funds and intermediaries focused on sustainable and regenerative food and agriculture, community ownership, and racial and economic justice.

To date, we have moved over $20 million to incredible organizations who, in turn, are moving loans and integrated capital on the ground.

We have created this site to share our learnings and contribute to the growing body of collective knowledge among funders, investors, investment advisors, and movement partners around community-controlled funds and alternatives to CDFIs, non-extractive finance, integrated capital, and shifting power in philanthropic and investor spaces.

We will also aim to lift up the Black, Indigenous, POC-led organizations we have supported - and ask our philanthropic and investor communities to resource these and similar organizations.

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The Waterway Partnership - formed in 2023 by the NoRegrets Initiative and Manzanita Capital Collective - is shifting capital and power to Black, Indigenous, POC-led community-controlled funds and intermediaries focused on sustainable and regenerative food and agriculture, community ownership, and racial and economic justice.

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Introduction to Radical Participatory Design 

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Introduction to Radical Participatory Design 

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1. Introduction and positionality

I am a Nigerian and a US American. As a human animal who is a part of nature, I inhabit multiple spaces of privilege and lack of privilege. I am a cisgender, heterosexual, Christian male. Simultaneously, I am a Black Nigerian in the US from an immigrant family. I am a member of the indigenous Ibibio people group and my name, Anietie, is a shortened version of the phrase 'Who Is like God?' When I write from an indigenous perspective, I tend to write from a perspective of African indigeneity which is different from indigenous perspectives in the Americas or Australia. There are many other parts of my background and identity that place me in positions of privilege or disadvantage depending on the context - country of residence, education, income, and so forth. Many of those have changed throughout my life.

One influential position or privilege I hold is the position of designer. I have practiced design in various communities around the world. I define communities as the group of beings for whom design is being done. In this paper, the term 'we' refers to those various groups or communities and myself, who, together, have practiced radical participatory design (RPD).

The purpose of this paper is four-fold. First, I am demythologising, decolonising, and refuturing participatory design (PD). Others have also critiqued PD. I am going further to decolonise it and show one picture of what PD can look like on the other side of decolonisation. There are other ways people are decolonising PD and I compare those in this paper. Second, in order to critique, I want to facilitate conversation and comparisons between PDs with different onto-epistemic centres. I want to place what we practice when we say PD in conversation with what others mean by those words. In order to do that, I must define what we practice. I have added the word 'radical' to differentiate what we practice, and this paper expounds on that practice. Third, in order to compare, I want to share a systematic study of RPD. The problem with conversing with other PD practitioners or projects is that it is difficult to understand what participation means in various projects, to what extent people were included, the ethics of the participation, or an evaluation of the participatory process. Even though systematisation can be a tool of colonialism, I use it to open up pathways of comparison and facilitate the ability of readers to implement RPD. Lastly, I want to encourage more designers in organisations to practice RPD. Despite any prior critique of PD, the field of design is largely unaffected. It is very easy for an academic to do something similar to RPD and much more difficult for designers in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors to do the same. I hope to increase the practice in those sectors, especially.

Due to those goals, in Part I of this paper, I review the pervasive problems with PD, decolonise the history of PD and participatory research (PR), and share a typology of participation that can be helpful to view different kinds of design. Using that typology, I describe RPD, its components and models, based on induction from lived experiential and relational knowledge. In Part II of this paper, I discuss the benefits, difficulties, tips, ethics, evaluation, and organisational barriers of RPD as well as a few ways to overcome those barriers, again induced from experiential and relational knowledge (Udoewa Reference Udoewa2022a).

2. Literature review of problems

Participatory design processes are not new. Communities 'unofficially' have used PD processes to solve community problems for millennia (Sanoff Reference Sanoff2011). Specifically, in western design practices of design, technology, and innovation companies, PD processes have increasingly become popular in the late twentieth century to today (Sanoff Reference Sanoff2011; Hartson & Pyla Reference Hartson and Pyla2012; Hess & Pipek Reference Hess and Pipek2012). This trend is most demonstrated by the now thirty-two-year history of the Participatory Design Conference, from 1990 to 2022 (Simonsen Reference Simonsen2022). Simultaneously, many issues, concerns, and problems have been raised about how PD is theorised, framed, defined, practiced, and evaluated (Kensing & Blomberg Reference Kensing and Blomberg1998; Robertson & Simonsen Reference Robertson and Simonsen2012; Frediani Reference Frediani2016; Charlotte Smith et al. Reference Charlotte Smith, Winschiers-Theophilus, Paula Kambunga and Krishnamurthy2020).

What is immediately evident, both from a literature review of PD and from conversations with other participatory designers, is that everyone in the PD community means something different when they use the term PD (Vines et al. Reference Vines, Clarke, Wright, McCarthy and Olivier2013, Reference Vines, Clarke, Light and Wright2015; Frauenberger et al. Reference Frauenberger, Good, Fitzpatrick and Iversen2015; Halskov & Hansen Reference Halskov and Hansen2015). The initial excitement of finding someone or some group who is using the same participatory process, gives way to confusion or disappointment because the other person or group actually is using a different process. This confusion stems from no shared definition of what PD is. Researchers and designers use the term PD to signify different understandings of power and empowerment, different levels of politics in the design process, different groups of people, different methods, different goals of participation, and different amounts and configurations of participation (Ertner, Kragelund & Malmborg Reference Ertner, Kragelund and Malmborg2010; Halskov & Hansen Reference Halskov and Hansen2015; Fischer, Östlund & Peine Reference Fischer, Östlund and Peine2021).

There are researchers and designers who use the term PD to signify the participation of internal or external stakeholders (Srinivasan & Shilton Reference Srinivasan and Shilton2006; d'Aquino & Bah Reference d'Aquino and Bah2014). Others use the term to mean the community who will use the product or service (Ssozi-Mugarura, Blake & Rivett Reference Ssozi-Mugarura, Blake and Rivett2017; Cho & Ho Reference Cho and Ho2020). Still others use the term to mean all internal and external stakeholders including community members and internal organisational stakeholders and executives (Byrne & Sahay Reference Byrne and Sahay2007; Vázquez et al. Reference Vázquez, Vargas, Unger, De Paepe, Mogollón-Pérez, Samico, Albuquerque, Eguiguren, Cisneros, Rovere and Bertolotto2015). In this paper, we focus PD on the participation of the people for whom or on whose behalf we are designing - the community. It is their expertise that should drive the process.

Methodologically, we have found that PD can be used to mean interacting with the community during the design process, a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology. There are researchers and designers who use PD to mean the interaction with the community during the process: ethnography among the community, prototyping and testing among the community, and launching the product or service to the community. Because this is simply the generic design process, we will not spend time discussing this understanding of participation. Others use the term to mean a specific method, for example, choosing between a usability test, an interview, or participatory research or design (Fang Reference Fang2012; Adeagbo & Naidoo Reference Adeagbo and Naidoo2021). There are researchers and designers who use the term to signify a way of conducting a method. For example, we can run a design studio with our designers, or we can invite community members to take part in the design studio with us. In this way, we are doing the design studio method in a participatory way (Walujan et al. Reference Walujan, Hopkins and Istandar2002; Priya, Shabitha & Radhakrishnan Reference Priya, Shabitha and Radhakrishnan2020; Tsai et al. Reference Tsai, Ochiai, Tseng and Deng2022). Still, others use PD to signify a methodology - a collection of methods or a toolkit with guiding principles that guide one to choose specific methods in the toolkit at specific times (Spinuzzi Reference Spinuzzi2005; Hwang Reference Hwang2012; Birachi et al. Reference Birachi, Hoekstra, Jogo and Mekonnen2014). Lastly, there are many times we do not know what PD means methodologically because it is not explicitly defined in a particular research paper, article, talk, or blog post.

Each of the aforementioned methods and meanings of PD has different implications on the politics of design, the definition of participation, and the goals of the participatory process (Halskov & Hansen Reference Halskov and Hansen2015; Bossen, Dindler & Iversen Reference Bossen, Dindler and Iversen2016). Mutual learning is one goal or one definition of participation stated by certain participatory designers (Baumgartner et al. Reference Baumgartner, Aurora, Karanth and Ramaswamy2002; Winschiers-Theophilus et al. Reference Winschiers-Theophilus, Chivuno-Kuria, Kapuire, Bidwell and Blake2010; Ai Reference Ai2019). Another common goal or definition of participation is eliciting the community's perspective (Moraveji et al. Reference Moraveji, Li, Ding, O'Kelley and Woolf2007; Neves Reference Neves2014; Rajamany et al. Reference Rajamany, van Biljon and van Staden2022). Other goals are greater ownership or facilitating better outcomes and change (Chirowodza et al. Reference Chirowodza, van Rooyen, Joseph, Sikotoyi, Richter and Coates2009; Yasuoka & Sakurai Reference Yasuoka and Sakurai2012; Alves Villarinho Lima & Almeida Reference Alves Villarinho Lima and Almeida2021). Kim focuses on participation as interacting with a service after launch (Kim Reference Kim2020). Again, there are research papers, articles, blogs, and talks that do not explicitly describe the goal or definition of participation at all (Clement et al. Reference Clement, Costantino, Kurtz and Tissenbaum2008; Johannessen & Ellingsen Reference Johannessen and Ellingsen2008).

Though there are multiple attempts to measure the effects of participation, without a goal or a definition of participation, it is difficult to evaluate whether empowerment happened or the process was successful, which can be different than the evaluation of the design product or artefact (Ibrahim & Alkire Reference Ibrahim and Alkire2007; Luttrell et al. Reference Luttrell, Quiroz, Scrutton and Bird2009; Jupp, Ali & Barahona Reference Jupp, Ali and Barahona2010). The PD result or the success of the participatory process is more important than the design because of the effect and impact of the process on the design (Bratteteig & Wagner Reference Bratteteig and Wagner2016). Today, there is still no organic consensus on how to evaluate participatory processes. In fact, formal evaluations are uncommon, often lack details, and are not done in the same participatory way as the, hopefully, participatory project that is being evaluated (Bossen et al. Reference Bossen, Dindler and Iversen2016).

In addition to the aforementioned problems, there have been other critiques of PD - the loss of a democratic commitment, the lack of a posthuman democracy, the oversimplification and ignorance of power dynamics in the community, the lack of understanding of how participation works or does not work in other cultures, availabilities of community members, power imbalance, romanticising local knowledge, reinforcing local power imbalances, etc. (Cooke & Kothari Reference Cooke and Kothari2001; Neef Reference Neef2003; Winschiers Reference Winschiers2006; Kesby Reference Kesby2007; Blomberg & Karasti Reference Blomberg and Karasti2012; Krüger et al. Reference Krüger, Duarte, Weibert, Aal, Talhouk and Metatla2019). It would be epistemologically biased and supremacist to cite published critiques, preferring the written word, when communities have known and experienced these problems before they were ever written. So I am sharing a critique based on the experience of communities and projects of which I have been a part. Unfortunately, each of the aforementioned categories of PD - whether interaction, method, way of doing a method, or methodology - has a paradoxical way of maintaining or strengthening the power imbalance (Udoewa Generations n.d.). If designers invite community members to participate, they are reinforcing the power differential, the fact that they have the power to invite or not to invite. They have the power to choose who, when, where, how, and if to invite. All the choices are in their hands. The very act of 'empowering' users or community members, reinforces the designer's own power to do so and the seeming lack of power community members have to participate in their own way on their own terms (Rowlands Reference Rowlands1995; Gaventa & Cornwall Reference Gaventa and Cornwall2008; Toomey Reference Toomey2011; Zamenopoulos et al. Reference Zamenopoulos, Lam, Alexiou, Kelemen, De Sousa, Moffat and Phillips2019; Thinyane et al. Reference Thinyane, Bhat, Goldkind and Cannanure2020).

The power-maintaining act of 'empowerment' is a form of colonisation (Udoewa Generations n.d.). Designers and design, technology, and innovation organisations regularly colonise the futures of community members through the ownership, control, and maintenance of power structures governing the products and services community members use to accomplish various goals in their lives. Colonisation, through the guise of PD, exacerbates and compounds the problem because it creates the false expectation that this process and its outcomes will be beneficially different from past colonial experiences.

Research justice and design justice offer us full images of a postcolonial PD practice and how it might function. Research justice, which includes participatory action research, is the eradication of research oppression when community members have access to all forms of knowledge to affect change, recognising their own expertise and knowledge equal to formal modes of knowledge (Williams & Brydon-Miller Reference Williams and Brydon-Miller2004; Assil, Kim & Waheed Reference Assil, Kim and Waheed2015). Research justice equalises the power of cultural and spiritual knowledge of communities, experiential knowledge of communities, and institutional knowledge of research organisations. Design justice insists on 'community participation, leadership, and accountability throughout a collaborative, transparent design process,' centred on the community who owns the design artefacts and the benefits, stewardship, and narratives about the artefacts (Costanza-Chock Reference Costanza-Chock2018, Reference Costanza-Chock2020). When reviewing the body of PD, it is difficult to find examples that fit these definitions of research justice and design justice.

Therefore, we introduce the term RPD to differentiate and represent a type of PD that is participatory to the root or core: full inclusion as equal and full members of the research and design team. Unlike other uses of the term PD, RPD is not merely interaction, a method, a way of doing a method, nor a methodology. It is a meta-methodology, or a way of doing a methodology. There are design methodologies that also involve paradigms, mindsets, or orientations; however, they embody both an approach and a set of methods or methodologies (Lincoln & Guba Reference Lincoln and Guba2000; Bradbury Reference Bradbury and Bradbury2015; Nirwan & Dhewanto Reference Nirwan and Dhewanto2015; Yan et al. Reference Yan, Orkis, Khan Sohail, Wilson, Davis and Storey2020). RPD is only a meta-methodology. As an overlay on top of a methodology, practitioners can use any guide, toolkit, and methodology and do it in a critically and radically participatory way.

In this paper, I avoid calling what others call PD, which maintains and strengthens power imbalances between community members and designers, simply 'PD,' while adding adjectives like 'radical,' 'relational,' 'critical,' or 'postcolonial' in front of what I and others call PD. Instead, I want to practice the decolonising move of decentering the dominant perspective and practice. In order to de-centre all types of PD, I will use an adjective with all kinds of PD. I will call PD, which maintains and strengthens power imbalances between designers and community members, colonial participatory design (CPD). I will use the terms RPD, critical PD, relational PD, and postcolonial PD interchangeably.

Let us define a few terms. Radical comes from the Latin 'radix' meaning root. RPD means a design that is participatory to the root, all the way through, from the beginning to the end, from top to bottom. Colonialism is the ideologies, philosophies, policies, systems, or practices that 'seek to impose the will of one people on another and to use the resources of the imposed people for the benefit of the imposer' (Asante Reference Asante, Dei and Kempf2006). Colonisation is the enactment, process, or action of imposing the will of one people on another, using resources of the latter for the benefit of the imposer. Coloniality is simply the nature or quality of colonialism or a colonial way of being.

Eve Tuck, an Unangax̂ scholar and associate professor of critical race and indigenous studies, and K. Wayne Yang, a professor of critical pedagogy and indigenous organising, wrote a paper, Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor, in which they argue that decolonisation is literally only about the repatriation of Indigenous land (Tuck & Yang Reference Tuck and Yang2012). Unfortunately, they only associate the word decolonisation with settler colonialism, Americocentrically reducing colonial relationships into a settler-native-slave triad (Garba & Sorentino Reference Garba and Sorentino2020), forgetting that slaves are also indigenous people forcibly removed from their land, and forgetting the relationality of certain pre-modern, European indigenous groups that modern European colonists forsook. Instead, Shoemaker highlights multiple types of colonialism - settler, planter, extractive, trade, transport, imperial power, not-in-my-backyard, legal, rogue, missionary, romantic, postcolonial, etc. (Shoemaker Reference Shoemaker2015). Each type of colonialism has associated colonising acts and enactments or colonisation. Thus, land is not the only thing that can be colonised. Knowledge production systems, natural resources, ways of being, currencies, histories, languages, futures, methodologies, bodies, even our minds can be colonised, any resource or asset (Asante Reference Asante, Dei and Kempf2006; Smith Reference Smith2021). When I have asked African or Asian Indigenous persons if their people were colonised even after keeping or regaining their land, they say yes. Different from the indigenous experience in North America and Australia where colonisers never left, the indigenous experience in Africa and Asia includes acknowledged colonisation, not just colonialism, after the colonisers generally left. For example, Zimbabwe and Siamese people were colonised by their postcolonial and uncolonised (settler colonialism) states, respectively (Murdoch Reference Murdoch1967; Dagarembga Reference Dagarembga, Akomolafe, Asante and Nwoye2017). The avoidance of the term colonisation allows people to critique the nature of coloniality or system of colonialism while avoiding any personal responsibility or agency in actual, colonising acts.

Thus, decolonisation is the act or process of freeing one people from the imposition of another, giving the former people control over the resource that was taken for the benefit of the latter. Decoloniality is the nature or quality of a decolonising project, movement, practice, system, autonomous region, philosophy, or ideology, or a decolonial way of being. Certain researchers attempt to decolonise PR through methods instead of a meta-methodology (Seppälä, Sarantou & Miettinen Reference Seppälä, Sarantou and Miettinen2021). For example, Charlotte Smith et al. ( Reference Charlotte Smith, Winschiers-Theophilus, Paula Kambunga and Krishnamurthy2020) and Evans, Leah & Petrović ( Reference Evans, Leah and Petrović2020) attempt to decolonise PD. In both cases, as Charlotte Smith admits, the researchers chose the methodologies and level of participation, and there was no remuneration for community members. Stanton ( Reference Stanton2014) and Olko ( Reference Olko2019) attempt to decolonise community-based PR, also providing no remuneration for community participants. Both show work that does not extend to design, and Stanton uses a designer-dominated understanding of project timelines. Olko does work to create an indigenous research methodology and focuses on empowerment instead of divesting of power, treating community knowledge and researcher knowledge as equal, different from an RPD understanding. The most similar work to RPD may be work like Cahill and the Fed-up Honeys (Cahill Reference Cahill2005, Reference Cahill2006). Their work differs in that it is not clear what transformation occurs from the work or if the participant remuneration was equitable to the professional researcher remuneration. There have been times when Cahill co-authors with the community and others where she has authored solo, different from RPD. Because the participatory process of most papers is not fully explicated in terms of choice of methodology, evaluation, transformation, remuneration, equity, initiation, negotiation, it is difficult to understand how similar it is to RPD.

The last term to define is postcolonial which normally refers to the period after formal colonial rule, while postcolonialism or postcolonial theory studies the political, cultural, and economic legacy of imperialism and colonialism. Postcolonial theory has been criticised as a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism which is why a decolonial approach goes further to de-link the ontology and epistemology of coloniality (Ali Reference Ali2014). When I say another name for RPD is Postcolonial Design, I do not mean design in the postcolonial age. Rather, I mean a type of design that is after the domination of colonial design that disempowers communities and maintains hierarchies. I mean a post-(colonial design).

In the remainder of the paper, I first attempt to decolonise the usual PD and PR history that starts in Scandinavia or South America, showing how its history goes much further back in time. Next, I discuss the typologies of design participation and place RPD in context by comparison. Then I introduce RPD and describe its components, as a way to evaluate and validate the participatory nature of a process, and its immediate implications. Throughout the paper, I will refer to a few case studies to elucidate the ideas.

3. Brief alternative history of participatory research and design

Most histories of PD begin with the Scandinavian model of collaborative design in the 1970s. Most histories of PR begin either with the Southern tradition in the 1970s with Paolo Freire ( Reference Freire1970) and Fals-Borda ( Reference Fals-Borda1987) or the Northern tradition in the 1940s with the theories of Lewin. However, beginning in the 1940s or 1970s represents a colonial history of PD and PR. In order to decolonise the history of PD and PR, we must first define design and research.

3.1. Glimpses from a decolonised history of participatory research

What happens if we define research simply as one or some combination of gathering, creating, storing, organising, analysing, transmitting, or using information (Udoewa Decades n.d.)? Then PR is simply doing those activities in a participatory way, in which the community participates. With such a definition we can see that communities have always practiced PR since the beginning of communities.

First, let us travel back between the 15th and 19th centuries. Oral histories as far north as South Carolina and as far south as Brazil, maintain that African women, who were captured, marched to the coast, stored in castles, and shipped across the Atlantic, braided and hid grains of rice in their hair as a means of defiance, preserving culture, and surviving (Carney Reference Carney2004; Rose Reference Rose2020). This is documentation, preservation, and transmission of information, for the rice eventually fed the plantation owner as well. Lastly, in a type or PR we call participatory appraisal, slaves in the Americas could then examine what food assets everyone had, to see what they could grow to eat and survive.

Second, we can travel to Ancient Greece, where midwives looked for methods of birth control. Animal herders shared that when their animals ate certain herbs their birth rate was lower (Riddle Reference Riddle1997). This transmission and passing of information is research.

Third, we can travel before homo sapiens, where early people used sharpened stones 2.6 million years ago (Pruitt Reference Pruitt2019). After much evolving trials and tests, stone hand axes emerged around 1.6 million years ago. Eventually they developed new knapping tools around 400,000 to 200,000 years ago, cutting blades 80,000 to 40,000 years ago, and small, sharp microblades 11,000 to 17,000 years ago. Then they developed axes, celts, and chisels during the Neolithic period around 12,000 years ago. All of this experimentation with materials and stones is experimental research or Research through Design (Jonas Reference Jonas2007).

Therefore, PR is not new. PR is ancient. The reason scholars create relatively recent PR histories is because of the rise of the professional researcher as a profession. It is important to note that there are design and research scholars who define PR as research in which community members engage with a required professional research. However, research has always been a public and participatory task or activity that was part of most jobs or roles. When we epistemologically open up our understanding of knowledge beyond mainstream, institutional knowledge to include experiential, cultural, embodied, aesthetic, and spiritual knowledge, the definition of research as 'investigation' is transformed to a pluriverse of definitions: learning circles, oral history, songs, storing info in a body, shamans, experimentations, receiving info stored in a body, storytelling, propagating information in a socio-human system, apprenticeships, and so forth. Likewise, the purpose of research is transformed from 'to establish fact or reach a conclusion' to a pluriverse of purposes: to survive, teach history, share values, do justice, answer a question, resist, leave a legacy, transform society, pass down culture, steward a system, etc.

3.2. Design thinking versus human-centred design

Design thinking (DT) and human-centred design (HCD) are often used interchangeably (Lake Reference Lake2018; Sekhar Reference Sekhar2018). I do not intend to disrupt this equivocation. I do want to clarify what I mean when I use the terms DT and HCD. Design thinking, literally, is thinking and acting and doing like a designer. This involves at least three activities (Drysdale Reference Drysdale2018; Chicago Architecture Center 2019; Udoewa Decades n.d.).

1. (i) Some type of information gathering, intake, or research.

2. (ii) Some type of idea generation.

3. (iii) Some type of prototyping and testing a solution.

If one does those things, she is thinking, acting, and doing like a designer; she is designing. Human-centred design is simply one way of doing design - designing so that one centres each phase of the design process on the humans for whom one is designing. Human-centred design is only one way, not the only way, of designing. One can also implement Activity-centred Design, Task-centred Design, Behaviour-driven Design, Test-driven Design, Biomimicry, Universal Design, Pluriversal Design, Values-sensitive Design, Circular Design, Speculative Design, Transition Design, Critical Design, Transgenerational Design, etc. (Lewis & Rieman Reference Lewis and Rieman1993; Woudhuysen Reference Woudhuysen1993; Benyus Reference Benyus1997; Gay & Hembrooke Reference Gay and Hembrooke2004; Mattu & Shankar Reference Mattu and Shankar2007; Dunne & Raby Reference Dunne and Raby2013; Davis & Nathan Reference Davis and Nathan2015; Irwin Reference Irwin2015; Moreno et al. Reference Moreno, De los Rios, Rowe and Charnley2016; Leitão Reference Leitão2020; Levy Reference Levy2020). One can even implement PD, the focus of this paper.

PD, then, is simply doing those activities (intaking information, ideating, and creating something to try or test) in a participatory way, in which the community participates (Asaro Reference Asaro2019, Vogel Reference Vogel2021, IGI Global 2022, Udoewa Decades n.d.). When defined as such, I hope it is clear that community design is inherently participatory, and communities of humans have always engaged in PD processes for hundreds of thousands of years. I note, again, that certain design scholars disagree and view PD as only occurring when communities work with professional designers. According to my experience and definition, the dynamics of participation by communities who will use a future design, can and do occur without a professional designer. I will share three global examples of communities that organically developed design solutions.

3.3. Glimpses from a decolonised history of participatory design

With 'more than seventy percent of the population in the developing world' and 'more than eighty percent of the population of South Asia' using medicinal plants for maintaining and improving health, India is an example of a country that has a widely used folk system of medicinal knowledge (Shukla & Gardner Reference Shukla and Gardner2006; Astutik, Pretzsch & Ndzifon Kimengsi Reference Astutik, Pretzsch and Ndzifon Kimengsi2019). To respond to the challenge of the use and conservation of medicinal plants, a natural resource, Indian communities developed three designs. Communities developed traditional systems of medicine (TSMs) that codified medical plant knowledge in texts or ancient scriptures (Ayurvedic, Siddha, etc.). Communities also developed folk medicine in which knowledge is learned by doing and passed down through oral tradition. Lastly, communities developed the expert approach to medicinal plant knowledge management, embodying the knowledge of Spiritual or Shaministic Medicine in people called healers who passed knowledge through apprenticeships. Even though the Ayurvedic and Siddha TSMs were codified more than 3,000 years ago, they represent the codification, and thus institutionalisation, of practices communities had been testing, designing, and using for thousands of years before that, passing the information down through oral tradition just like folk medicine (Shukla & Gardner Reference Shukla and Gardner2006, Astutik et al. Reference Astutik, Pretzsch and Ndzifon Kimengsi2019).

Another pre-1970s example of indigenous community design that also uses oral history is the role of the griot in West Africa, originating in the 13th century. The griot is a community role, created and designed to be a storyteller and oral historian of a community. 'Entrusted with the memorisation, recitation, and passing on of cultural traditions from one generation to the next,' griots were the social memory of a people group, a type of embodied design (WACH 2020). They utilised design methods like fables, folktales, songs, epic narratives, poems, instruments, proverbs, and more. The creativity of the griot oral tradition lies in the use of story, a framework deeply embedded in the human psyche, to both remember and convey various histories, but also to make those histories more memorable to the hearers. The application of storytelling to the social science of history is so effective, modern futurists and designers are employing it as a methodology in current design projects (Tuwe Reference Tuwe2016; Bisht Reference Bisht2017).

The third pre-1970s example of community design comes from water resource management-irrigation systems. As early humans began to congregate in larger communities enabled by the transition to farming, communities had to overcome various problems. How does a community grow enough food for a larger group of people? And how do they water all those crops when rainfall is not enough? What do they do if they receive too much rainfall and flooding destroys the crops? To answer the second and third questions, ancient Mesopatamians designed 'large storage basins to hold water and connected these by canals to their' fields (Mohammed Reference Mohammed2014). They also built up the banks of the rivers to prevent flooding when the river level was high. These are examples of community design. Though such canal systems were institutionalised around the world, they started as community responses to community problems.

Therefore, PD has been practiced long before participatory action research was introduced theoretically by Lippit and Radke in 1946 and Lewin in 1947, who, themselves, drew from the Scientific Method in Education movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Masters Reference Masters and Hughes1995, p. 1). Participatory design was practiced long before the 'Father of American Participatory Architecture,' Karl Lin, started the first community design centre in Philadelphia in 1961 as an example of participatory planning, the same year that Jane Jacobs published her book, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities,' as a critique against centralised planning, seeding the participatory planning movement (Jacobs Reference Jacobs1961; Finn & Brody Reference Finn and Brody2014). Even in international aid, PD started long before participation, 'as a central pillar of the basic needs approach to development, gained prominent support in the 1970s' (Cornwall Reference Cornwall2002).

There are many more examples of PD in the history of communities even in the pre-1940s 20th century, especially in service learning, community agriculture, civil rights, labour rights, history of women's rights, children's rights, etc. (Udoewa Reference Udoewa2022b). Communities have always addressed problems facing the community using community members. Going further, when we epistemologically widen our understanding of design as a knowledge-creating endeavour beyond mainstream, institutional design, to include design based on experiential, cultural, embodied, aesthetic, and spiritual knowledge, for a variety of purposes that communities pursue, then the model of design-as-problem-solving is transformed to a pluriverse of namologies (studies, perspectives, or ways of designing): problem-solving, legacy-passing, way-finding, justice-creating, purpose-locating, system care, beauty creation, system shaping, self-expression, cultural preservation, future embodiment, etc. (Ibibio Generations n.d.).

Because PD has always been a feature of community life, it does not make sense to talk about the 'history of PD,' as if there were a historical moment in time during which PD began apart from the historical start of communities. There is no such moment. This does not mean communities lacked any use for skilled crafts people, artisans, or designers. Rather, our alternative history means these specialists were members of the community and, thus, engaging in PD as opposed to the more recent development of hiring an expert outside and disconnected from the community to lead and resolve a community problem or issue. The reason most histories of PD start in the 1940s or 1970s is because they are documenting CPD, in which design organisations decide to allow or 'empower' community members to participate in the process. To differentiate CPD from RPD, we must first define what participation means.

4. The typology of design participation

There are many dimensions that can be used to characterise design participation or to determine whether a design or research process is participatory at all. To simplify the analysis, I will use three dimensions or questions.

1. (i) Who initiates the work, and how much do they initiate?

2. (ii) Who participates, and how fully do they participate?

3. (iii) Who leads the process, regardless of participation, and how much do they lead?

Notice each question contains a second independent clause to understand the extent of the dimension. The second part of each question implies that initiation, participation, and leadership are spectra ( Figure 1).

A research or design project can be initiated by the community who will benefit (the left end of the initiation spectrum), designers outside the community (the right end of the spectrum), or some combination of both (between the ends). Sometimes, a community wants to begin work to solve a community problem, and they first contact designers to gauge interest in helping before initiating the project work. Perhaps the designers become excited and help with further recruitment to initiate the project. The designers may have indirectly helped to initiate the project or aided the initiation; however, the community directly initiated the project, which is an example of community-dominant initiation. Likewise, before initiating work, a design group or organisation may contact community members to gauge their interest, availability, and need for conducting PD for a designer-perceived, community problem, which is an example of designer-dominant initiation. One example of equal, joint initiation is at the end of an RPD project, when the designers and community members on the team co-decide to initiate a second, follow-on project because there is more work to do or due to the implications of the current project. Initiation is the only dimension that cannot necessarily disqualify a project as RPD. A community-initiated PD project can be RPD, or CPD if designers usurp power; a designer-initiated PD project can be CPD, or RPD if designers divest of their power. The type of PD depends on the other two dimensions, leadership and participation.

Participation is harder to classify than initiation due to its multiple meanings. Projects can start, run, and conclude with only community members (the left end of the participation spectrum), only designers (the right end of the spectrum), or a combination of both designers and community members (between the ends). Certain designers view interviews or prototype testing with community members as 'community participation,' and would classify that as the 'community participates partially,' the right half of the participation spectrum ( Figure 1). I do not classify it as participation because I am evaluating participation on the design or research team, not participation as a research participant or prototype test participant. Even if one counts interviews as community participation, there are higher levels of participation beyond such implicit participation, levels that move towards the centre of the spectrum - equal participation. For instance, designers may seek community perspectives by inviting community members to participate in design activities, like a design studio or prototype evaluation, making the activity participatory. These invitations represent partial community participation due to the fact that the community is being invited to a session and not always present. Other designers go further and invite community members to an entire phase of activities, such as all activities in the design and test phase. This invitation still represents partial community participation because the community is being invited to only one phase. Other designers increase participation by inviting community members to all activities in all phases - research, synthesis, design, and implementation. From an RPD perspective, such an invitation is still partial community participation because the design team still has meetings, makes decisions, and practices design apart from community members. To explain, these activities relate to the multiple levels of design practice.

The first level of design education and practice are the mindsets for a particular methodology. These mindsets can be used by anyone, even without the title of designer, to bring the benefits of a design methodology to their work. The second and the most common level of teaching is the design process. A workshop or course teaching a design process usually mentions the mindsets and builds upon them with a process. One large difference between an actual design process and a course or workshop teaching a design process is linearity. The design process is inherently nonlinear, yet we teach design processes as if they were linear, which is a helpful structure for beginners. However, there is a third level of design practice and education that shows participants how to take the results of any design method or activity, evaluate it, compare it to the goal of the design process and the current project dynamics, and decide what is the next appropriate step as well as what information should be carried from the completed activity to that next step. This process of interpretation, negotiation, evaluation, goal measuring, synthesis, and decision-making between design activities is what allows designers often to go through a nonlinear process. The use of methods becomes nonlinear, as well, with designers often using a method depicted in a toolkit as only occurring in a particular phase of design, in another phase of design. Designers who say they are using a PD process often conduct this inter-activity process without community members, which means participation is not fully complete nor equal.

To reach the centre of the participation spectrum, equal participation ( Figure 1), designers must involve community members even in this sense-making process between design activities. Designers must involve community members in everything, all work and communications for the participation to be truly equal. On the other hand, community members do not have to invite designers to participate in the design process for the process to be participatory because PD is concerned with the participation of the beneficiaries of the design. Community design and community-driven design are inherently participatory (Moss Reference Moss2020). Still, when community members engage in design to solve community problems, they may choose to engage designers for a particular activity (partial designer participation) or for an entire phase of activities like the implementation phase of a project (increased partial designer participation). Also, community members could involve designers in even more participation - all phases in all activities - or ultimately involve designers even in the sense-making, decision-making, and preparation work between activities resulting in truly equal participation.

The last dimension is leadership. It is possible to participate in an activity and have no decision-making power, contribution, or value. Leadership is not a role on a design team, but rather the act of influencing and guiding. A person can be invited into an activity or process, but be prevented from influencing or guiding the process or results. Therefore, community leadership is a necessary component of postcolonial, critical PD. On the left end of the leadership spectrum is community leadership when the community leads the design process. Even if they hire a craftsperson, artisan, or designer as a vendor to implement their choices, they are still fully leading. When the community invites designers to lend leadership and guidance to an activity or phase of activities, participating as a thought partner, then the designers are partially co-leading. When the designers are invited to lend leadership and guidance to all activities of all phases as well as the sense-making and decision-making between activities, the team has achieved equitable co-leadership. Similarly, when community members are invited to lend leadership and guidance to an activity or phase of activities, the community is partially co-leading.

The three spectra of initiation, participation, and leadership can serve as axes in a conceptual three-dimensional space in order to locate and define various types of design approaches (Appendix Figure 1). For example, community design is research and design that only involves community members and is initiated and fully led by community members ( Figure 2). Community-driven design fully involves and is fully led by community members. However, it may vary in the amount of partial designer participation and partial designer initiation ( Figure 3).

Colonial participatory design occurs when PD is not fully, critically, or radically participatory to the core, meaning it may or may not fully involve community members in all activities, phases and sense-making and decision-making between activities, and ultimately, community members do not fully lead or co-lead ( Figure 4, Appendix Figure 2). We call designer-initiated, designer-led design with only designers, designer-driven design, a type of colonial design (not participatory).

Radical participatory design, in contrast, occurs when community members fully lead and fully participate in all activities of all phases including sense-making and decision-making between activities, regardless who initiates, with or without full or partial co-leadership and co-participation of designers ( Figure 5, Appendix Figures 3-4). We highlight designer-initiated RPD (Appendix Figure 4) because this is the main challenge design organisations and designers face. Usually, it is much easier for community-initiated projects to be RPD, by nature of the community's initiation (Guffey Reference Guffey2021, pp. 3-4). The bigger challenge is whether designer-initiated projects can be conducted in a way in which the community fully participates and fully co-leads or leads. Using our understanding of RPD according to the three axes of participation, initiation, and leadership, we can now describe RPD more specifically.

5. Radical participatory design

Radical participatory design is design that is participatory to the root, in every aspect. Regardless of who initiates a project, RPD fully includes the community members in all activities of all phases of the design process and in all interpretation, decision-making, and planning between design activities. In RPD, the community members not only fully participate, but they fully lead and drive the process. RPD is not a method, way of conducting a method, or a methodology; it does not define any design methodology. The community chooses the methodology. It is a meta-methodology, a way of doing a methodology. There are three characteristics of RPD. These characteristics can be used as a way to evaluate or validate the participatory nature of a process, whether it is truly, critically participatory. In Part 2, we will discuss ways of evaluating the success of the RPD process (Udoewa Reference Udoewa2022a).

(i) Community members are full, equal members of the research and design team from the beginning of the project to the end. There are no design team meetings, communications, and planning apart from community members. They are always there at every step and between steps because they are full, equal design team members.

Communities are not homogenous. Who decides who the community is? Anytime there is a question about deciding, if the professional designers make it, the leadership spectrum tips toward the designers. At the very least, decisions should be made together by the mixed design team (equitable co-leadership), and at best, the community decides. This is hard to do if the project is initiated by professional designers. In that case, they simply recruit initial community members at the start, and those community members help determine who is needed or whom to recruit. It does not matter if the initial recruitment of community members is not representative. An iterative process led by the initial and growing community members will help determine who should be on the team. Ultimately, the goal is a qualitatively representative sample of the community in a way that honours cultural definitions of leadership and participation, tipping the leadership and participation spectra back towards the community.

Many community members have jobs or other roles and responsibilities and may not have time to participate on the research and design team. Is it possible to pursue equity of participation where community members do not do the work but have decision-making power over the work? To answer this question we must uncover its assumptions and define a few terms. Equality means equal treatment: community members are full design team members. Equity means different treatment to achieve equal outcomes: community members have evaluative or approval power but do not participate due to time. There are two problems with the seeming equity approach.

First, there is no equity or equal outcomes. Community review boards can be implemented well; however, they are only a check and can stop a bad, unsafe, or harmful research plan, idea, or design from moving forward. Unfortunately, CRBs do not determine what research plans, ideas, or designs are created or proposed. If professional designers are framing plans, brainstorming ideas, and creating designs the outcomes will be different than if community members are doing the same thing on the design team. Equity of participation through community approval and accountability is not equity. In other words, communities can provide oversight and the leadership spectrum still be strongly on the side of the designers. Another way to say this is that the participation and leadership spectra are not fully independent. It is possible for the community to participate, be present, and not lead. But it is impossible for the community to fully lead without being present.

Second, the question reinforces white supremacy and centres the professional designer by using a Western designer-dominated notion of time and urgency (Creative Reaction Labs Multiple dates, Mowris Reference Mowris2020). A major learning of RPD is that the process moves 'slower' and goes on community time. RPD moves at the speed of community and community relations or equitably negotiated time, shifting the leadership spectrum toward the community or the centre (equitable co-leadership). There may be times when urgency, not just a sense of urgency, may require an RPD team to move forward without the community fully represented, for instance, if there is danger or harm. However, the process becomes a CPD process if the urgency is determined by the professional designers. Additionally, danger and harm can be treated by immediate emergency responses outside of a design process, so designers must be wary of using such a reason to move ahead with a now CPD process without full, community-representative participation and leadership. In RPD, because the community is leading, the work only occurs without full community representation, if the community initiates and determines there is sufficient urgency, for example for community safety, to move forward without full representation. It is the community's decision.

(ii) Community members outnumber non-community, professional designers on the design team.

What happens when the professional designers are members of the community and the dichotomy breaks down? In my experience, people holding multiple roles usually have a primary role affecting the leadership spectrum of the topology. If the designer-community member is facilitating the entire process, choosing methodologies, and leading, that person is serving primarily as a professional designer even though she carries community knowledge, tipping the leadership spectrum to the designer side. One can also embody the duality, primarily, as a community member. In such a case, the person may still be an expert in design from a modernist perspective, but they are allowing their expertise in cultural, lived, experiential, community knowledge to dominate, and they are placing their design expertise equal to and alongside all the other expertises that all other community members bring to the work. The community may or may not call on the person's design skills or any other community member's skills at any particular moment in their process. For instance, I am working on a project to redesign a parent-teacher association so that it is racially just. Since I am primarily acting as a community member, many people facilitate and my design skills do not dominate; my design skills are simply a set of skills offered alongside all the other skills and assets of all the other community members, tipping the leadership spectrum to the community side.

Because community members are full, equal members of the design team in RPD, community members have full participation and full co-leadership, two of three characteristics of design justice (Costanza-Chock Reference Costanza-Chock2018, Reference Costanza-Chock2020). Full accountability, the third characteristic, is a natural part of community design and community driven-design when the community initiates the project. In order to achieve community accountability when designers or design organisations initiate the project, the designers must divest of their power. Divestment is different from CPD which seeks to empower community members. Such empowerment paradoxically reinforces and maintains the hierarchy between privileged designers who have the power and position to empower others and the communities who have no or little perceived power apart from the designers. Instead, RPD invites designers to divest of their power which community members, then, assume. The design organisation receives a better design outcome, better attuned to the needs of the community who feels ownership over the design outcomes; and the community has more assumed, not granted, power, as a relational and systemic outcome. A type of power exchange occurs in RPD, not through empowerment, but through divestment of power.

Because the design process is iterative and, often, never complete, a project that begins as RPD may later switch to CPD or design injustice after the implementation stage or in future versions. Community participation and leadership can always end in the future, and designers and a design organisation may stop divesting of their power and reassume power. An example occurred in a recent project to redesign an international service-learning program. We practiced RPD with a community of students, and when it was time to implement our community design which fit the needs of the student community members, the nonprofit said no and took power away from the community of students (2018, 2022). The fact that a design organisation can reassume power represents a power imbalance that RPD does not eliminate whenever funding and resources from an organisation make a design project possible. Due to this possibility, there is a third characteristic that becomes more important after the design stage.

(iii) Community members retain and maintain accountability, leadership, and ownership of design outcomes and narratives about the design artefacts and work.

How are design team members accountable to the full community? How does decision-making work with a large group? Are there conflicts, differences of opinions? Who resolves this? These are all the wrong questions. I cannot answer them abstractly but only in the context of a specific project. The importance of the spectra remains: who initiates; who participates, who leads? The important question is not how accountability, decisions, and resolutions are determined. The important question is who determines or leads it. The community decides in an RPD process. Some projects may use a community review board; however, the mode of accountability must be culturally appropriate to the ontology of the community participating and what accountability means to them. The same is true with decisions. In many RPD projects, the community first decides how to decide so that when decisions are made using the chosen decision-making model, everyone accepts the result. Because of the importance of first choosing how to decide, deciding the decision-making model is usually done either by consensus, consent-based decision-making, or unanimity. There are RPD projects in relational communities in which we use a type of relational approach to the political process of decision-making. In short, instead of choosing the best option among the desires of individual people, the decision comes out of the union of purpose and relationship among community members in the same way that your body naturally makes decisions to send blood to a part of your body that is injured. I will share more in a future paper focusing on decision-making in RPD. Lastly, fear of open conflict is another way white supremacy is reinforced in design (Mowris Reference Mowris2020). There are many cultures that welcome or embrace conflict of ideas or thoughts, which can be healthy.

Radical participatory design goes further than research justice which equalises the value of experiential and lived knowledge of the community, the cultural knowledge of the community, and the institutional knowledge of organisations (Assil et al. Reference Assil, Kim and Waheed2015). Radical participatory values the lived and experienced community knowledge above the design and design process knowledge of the designers. For example, the value of a patient's knowledge of their body and any problems with its functioning is different from the medical knowledge of the doctor (Dankl & Akoglu Reference Dankl and Akoglu2021). A person can listen to the signals of pain and discomfort from their body and act in ways to address certain problems without formal medical knowledge. However, it is very difficult for a medical professional to address a patient's problem without the knowledge and information from the patient about what is happening, what hurts, how, when, and where it hurts. Likewise, it is possible for communities to design solutions to problems without any formal knowledge of design processes; communities have done this throughout the history of communities. However, it is very difficult for designers to design sustainable, accepted, and utilised solutions to problems without any community knowledge and experience. Radical participatory design recognises the value imbalance and has a bias towards the community's experience, skills, and embodied knowledge.

The goal of RPD is transformational justice: research justice, design justice, and radically transformational justice. Conducting RPD is the just way to design. Research justice communities often say no policy, no research, 'nothing about us without us.' Justice is the goal and serves to relate and connect the other goals of CPD such as community perspectives, better design outcomes, and mutual learning. Justice automatically includes perspectives of the community because they are justly represented in the group of decision makers - designers; in fact, in RPD, the community members become designers. Justice automatically improves the design outcomes because the community who will use the designs are driving the process bringing their own expertise, desires, destinies, lived experiences, cultural knowledge, and futures to the design team. Justice moves beyond including perspectives to divesting the power of designers, while the community drives the process. Justice automatically creates mutual learning by putting diverse groups of people in touch with each other and creating connections between designers and community members. Mutual learning is only a goal from a CPD designer perspective. From the community perspective, mutual learning is a benefit, and the goal is more equitable outcomes and justice - full leadership, decision-making authority, participation, and accountability in a process that produces something for themselves and their community.

Because RPD is participatory to the core, RPD transforms the design process to an educational process. At every step of the way, professional designers may be creating educational experiences for the design team to learn and practice a skill before they use it in the next step. At the same time, according to the benefit of mutual learning, designers are also learning about the community not only from the research participants or testing with community members but from other research and design team members who are also community members. Research is transformed from a phase of activities in a design process to a mode of learning undergirding all phases of the design process. All design work becomes research and an educational experience through which designers learn.

Ultimately, RPD changes the role of the designer and the community member. The role of designer as facilitator is better than 'designer as executive,' but 'designer as facilitator' still maintains a hierarchy (Lee Reference Lee2008; Sanders & Stappers Reference Sanders and Stappers2008; Bang Reference Bang2009; Buys Reference Buys2019). Ultimately, RPD moves from 'designer as facilitator' to 'community member as facilitator,' decentering the designer. Even if an RPD process begins with a designer functioning as facilitator, community members would slowly, regularly, and increasingly begin to facilitate design activities, meetings, workshops, and sessions. There is too much power in the role of the facilitator - identifying interactions, moderating, facilitating cooperation, facilitating debate and conflict of ideas, introducing topics clearly or unclearly, facilitating the creation of ground rules or setting them, choosing processes, encouraging mindsets conducive for research and designing, managing the culture of design meetings, facilitating the search for information and identification of categories and problem definitions, helping to define evaluation criteria, summarising information, and managing relational dynamics (Ontkóc & Kotradyová Reference Ontkóc and Kotradyová2021, p. 3). Facilitation is never neutral. The application of all these skills represent power. In RPD, wherever there is power, designers must divest of it, while community members assume it. Facilitation is a key location of such power and a perfect example of an opportunity to divest of power. In all of my RPD work, community members are facilitating sessions and meetings. Even if they are not initially comfortable doing so or want to learn more about it, they go through the process of learning and practicing and doing specifically because, from a justice lens, the result of a design activity is different depending on who is facilitating.

In RPD, we use the model of 'designer as community member.' 'Designer as community member' means the gifts and skills the designer offers (design) are equal to and alongside all the skills and assets that all the other community members bring. The design skills of the designer are not greater than the gifts of the community members. The 'designer as community member' model shifts the leadership spectrum back toward the community. With the designer in the role of community member, the choice of research or design methodology opens up as the community, rather than the professional designer, facilitates the choice. The role of community members shifts not only to 'community member as facilitator,' but also 'community member as designer.'

By bringing awareness and intention to the participatory nature and three spectra of design processes, we hope to reverse the intrapenetration of the larger system's social field (Scharmer Reference Scharmer2009) into the micro-social field of the design process and create 'suspended space.' In design processes, we normally carry the thinking, hierarchies, separations, absencing, and power dynamics of the world into the spaces and processes we engage, whether it is playing in a playground, eating in a restaurant, applying for benefits, or working in an office. I call this intrapenetration. In the suspended space of an RPD process, we are creating a liberatory micro-social field where we suspend the class, power, and hierarchical differences of the world and first create interpenetration. In interpenetration, not only does the larger system's social field affect our design process's social field, but the social field of the design process begins to affect and make small changes to the system's social field. For example, in my project to design a racially just PTA, we try to embody racial justice on our design team in our design work. Remnants of this more just, whole, self-decentring social field of our design sessions tend to cross the boundary and linger outside of the design process as we interact with each other in the neighbourhood and the school. Our goal is to create suspended space in our RPD process and begin to extend that suspended space for longer periods of time until we switch to extrapenetration where the micro-social field of the design process is only affecting the larger system's social field. In other words, this intentional, awareness-based meta-methodology slowly begins to alter the system.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, we discussed the various problems and conflicting definitions, contexts, and goals of the term PD. To clarify what I mean when I use the term, I have introduced a new term, a meta-methodology called RPD.

We covered the history of PD and PR, highlighting that communities have always engaged in PD and PR since the formation of communities; any history of PD is nonsensical as there was no historical start of PD apart from the historical formation of communities. Through the lenses of initiation, leadership, and participation, we explored the typology of participation and what people mean by the term 'participatory.' Radical participatory design, regardless of who initiates the project, is one in which the community both drives and leads the process, outnumbers the professional designers and researchers, and participates in all activities, phases, and interactivity work, fully owning the outcomes and artefacts as well as the narratives around those outcomes. In an RPD process, we discard the 'designer as facilitator' model and move to the 'designer as community member,' 'community member as designer,' and 'community member as facilitator' models representing a power exchange.

There are three main areas of further work to share. In part II of this paper, we will explore other parts of RPD (Udoewa Reference Udoewa2022a). For instance, why should anyone use RPD? What is the benefit? While this paper discusses the motivation and meta-methodological framework and models, in part II of this paper, I continue expanding about the RPD meta-methodology including the benefits and how RPD connects to futures design, systems practice, and pluriversal design, as well as community-centred, society-centred, life-centred, and planet-centred design. I will discuss the relationship between RPD and empathy, comparing it to other design and awareness-based ways of achieving empathy. I will elaborate on the difficulties of RPD as well as tips to handle the difficulties. I will explore the ethics and evaluation of RPD in order to determine if a PD process was radically participatory and the transformation that occurs when it is. Lastly, I will further discuss organisational resistance to RPD and organisational ways to encourage its use. All of these components - benefits, empathy, ethics, evaluation, transformation - are all important characteristics of RPD and helpful in characterising RPD so as to compare it to other namologies (studies, perspectives, or ways of designing) and in assessing the radicality of participation of any particular project (Ibibio Generations n.d.).

A second possible further direction is to more fully develop an understanding and framework of relational design of which RPD is an instance. This explicit framework is called Relational Design with capital letters. By Relational Design, I mean explicit ways of transforming each of the transactive, subject/object, third-person knowing steps of a generic design process into a relational one. It can happen naturally in an RPD process. At the same time, it is possible for others to use an RPD process and engage in a process dominated by third-person knowledge-seeking (though hopefully checked by lived experiential, spiritual, and cultural knowledge on the team). I am currently experimenting with a more explicit relational process with other community members and hope to share more about Relational Design in the future.

A third area of work is the political ecology of decision-making in design, through a relational approach, as mentioned earlier. There are ways in which RPD communities make decisions not from an ontology of individualism, nor from one of a network of individuals, but from a radically relational approach, relationality to the root. Instead of weighing the individual preferences of individual entities to make a decision, decisions are automatically sensed, known, or made from an ecological approach in which everyone is consciously aligned with a system purpose as well as their role in the system. These future directions will help elucidate other components of RPD, as well as create a more enriched picture of the many forms it takes in practice.

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An introduction to radical participatory design: decolonising participatory design processes | Design Science | Cambridge Core

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An introduction to radical participatory design: decolonising participatory design processes - Volume 8

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Ahupuaa: Resources to learn about Native Hawaiian Economic Model

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Ahupuaa: Resources to learn about Native Hawaiian Economic Model

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Here are resources to learn more about the Ahupuaa, the Native Hawaiian Aina (land) based economic model.

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Ahupuaʻa Accelerator Initiative - Hawaii Conservation Alliance

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The Ahupuaʻa Accelerator Initiative (AAI) was created to facilitate and support ahupuaʻa-wide restoration through community-based and culturally grounded management of ’āina and kai.

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Hulihia is an integral energy in our cosmologies, a natural cycle in our land/sea/sky/dreamscapes, and manifests, again and again, in our histories. This document is a Native Hawaiian perspective that takes a land based approach to creating new systems and processes to address significant social change. Drafted during the pandemic it is still a relevant perspective to regenerative work and how to design new structures and frameworks that are land based.

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Data Trust Framework Using Blockchain Technology and Adaptive Transaction Validation

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Data Trust Framework Using Blockchain Technology and Adaptive Transaction Validation

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Data Trust Framework Using Blockchain Technology and Adaptive Transaction Validation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Trust is the main barrier preventing widespread data sharing. The lack of transparent infrastructures for implementing data trust prevents many data owners from sharing their data and concerns data users regarding the quality of the shared data. Data trust is a paradigm that facilitates data sharing by forcing data users to be transparent about the process of sharing and reusing data. Blockchain technology proposes a distributed and transparent administration by employing multiple parties to maintain consensus on an immutable ledger. This paper presents an end-to-end framework for data trust to enhance trustworthy data sharing utilizing blockchain technology. The framework promotes data quality by assessing input data sets, effectively manages access control, and presents data provenance and activity monitoring. We introduce an assessment model that includes reputation, endorsement, and confidence factors to evaluate data quality. We also suggest an adaptive solution to determine the number of transaction validators based on the computed trust value. The proposed data trust framework addresses both data owners’ and data users’ concerns by ensuring the trustworthiness and quality of the data at origin and ethical and secure usage of the data at the end. A comprehensive experimental study indicates the presented system effectively handles a large number of transactions with low latency.

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Mobilizing Money and Movements: Creative Finance for Food Systems Transformation 

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Mobilizing Money and Movements: Creative Finance for Food Systems Transformation 

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A library of community ownership.

Most businesses aim to get acquired or go public, which often pits founding teams against the communities they serve.

We’re working to enable a third path that benefits all stakeholders for the long-term, an Exit to Community!

Business purpose can align with ownership

Founding can teams let go at the right time

Communities can grow the business they value

Allies in consulting, policy, and academia can help advance economic democracy

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The AI workspace that works for you. | Exit to Community

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A tool that connects everyday work into one space. It gives you and your teams AI tools—search, writing, note-taking—inside an all-in-one, flexible workspace.

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Hacking Capital: DIY Farm Technology as Generative Commoning.

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Hacking Capital: DIY Farm Technology as Generative Commoning.

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Looking at conventional agricultural technology we see that it is based on a perceived need, driven by experts, and developed with a for profit mandate. In contrast, farm hackers are responding to a lack of suitable tools on the market and approach the production of appropriate technologies through the hacker and DIY ‘ethic’. In this paper I link this ethic and the corresponding practices of farm hackers to the concept of commoning and explore the growing literature on commons- based peer production (CBPP). I highlight how some scholars have suggested CBPP as an alter- native to market forces, while others contend that it is part of the same system, relying on global- ized trade and procurement. Rather than taking an ‘either or’ stance, I look at what Michel Bau- wens calls ‘neither and both.’ That is to say, commoning exists within market driven systems and can both further entrench commodity relations as well as open up new modes of engagement. The first type links to what Tsing dubbed ‘salvage accumulation’, the translation of peripheral commons and invisible labour into market commodities. However, I suggest that what is going on in the production of DIY farm tools is actually the reverse: farm hackers are drawing market com- modities from the center to the periphery, and through this process create new forms of commons.

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Hacking Capital  - farm hacking as commoning.pdf

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Digital technology has catalyzed polarization, inequality, loneliness and fear.

Plurality details how Digital Minister Audrey Tang and her collaborators – architects of Taiwan’s internationally acclaimed digital democracy – achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth that harnesses digital tools to strengthen both social unity and diversity.

From intimate digitally empowered telepathy to global trade running on social networks rather than money, Plurality offers tools to radically enrich relationships while making sure we leave no one behind.

The ideas promise to transform every sector from health care to media, as illustrated by the way it has been written: as a chorus of open, self-governing collaboration of voices from around the globe.

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Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy

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Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy

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Why We Need an Economics Grounded in the Common Good

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Drawing from her work with the Vatican, the WHO, and the Global Commission on Water, Mariana Mazzucato outlines five pillars for this new framework: purpose-driven missions, co-creation, shared knowledge, equitable access and reward, and transparency. Real-world failures like vaccine apartheid during COVID-19 show what happens when these are missing. Mazzucato calls for a fundamental overhaul of multilateral institutions and economic thinking—especially in how wealthier nations engage with the Global South—to prioritize planetary health, justice, and collective well-being. She frames this as a moral and practical imperative for 2025 and beyond.

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Why We Need An Economics Grounded In The Common Good

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From the ‘season of superlatives’ to the season of change

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A Grassroots Coalition for Food Sovereignty in the Bay

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The People’s Food and Farm Project seeks to address the fractures and inequities in the Bay Area food system by building a grassroots movement and ballot initiative for a socially just, environmentally sustainable, and economically thriving food system that centers the voices, dreams, and wisdom of workers and BIPOC communities.

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We envision a Bay Area where food is recognized as a human right and our foodshed flourishes through regenerative care for water and land, alongside equitable distribution of resources and decision-making power.

Previously disenfranchised communities determine their food futures

Those who grow, prepare, and distribute our food are valued, protected, and properly resourced for their labor

Everyone can access or produce nourishing, culturally-relevant foods that heal our bodies while in harmony with our ecosystems

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A set of ecological principles serve to guide the design and implementation of the Mycelium Fund. This experimental granting fund explores the possibilities of a self-distributing financing system and is informed by mechanisms of resource valuation and distribution found in ecological communities, particularly those deep beneath the ground.

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The Mycelium Fund MYCELIUM FUND — ECOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES

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Introduction Lying just below our feet is an entire community at work, supporting above-ground life and shaping earth’s evolutionary history for more than 475 million years. First, tiny strings o…

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2024 Open Source Software Funding Report

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2024 Open Source Software Funding Report

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How do organizations contribute to open source software?

A core objective of the survey is to estimate the “value-added” to open source by organizations.

How much does a typical organization contribute to open source?

How is support distributed across different channels?

Can we scale estimates from our survey to capture a wider population of organizations?

We use survey responses to estimate contribution value, taking care to distinguish labor⁷ from direct financial contribution.⁸ In doing so, we can both (a) characterize a typical organization who contributes to open source and (b) extrapolate these findings to establish an aggregate estimate for the value provided to open source by all contributing organizations.

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This report summarizes insights from the inaugural The objective of this study was to better understand 2024 Open Source Software Funding Survey ¹, a collaboration between GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and researchers from Harvard University. how organizations fund, contribute to, and otherwise support open source software.

¹ A copy of the survey text can be found here.

² For the purposes of this survey, an organization includes entities such as private companies, NGOs, or public agencies that commit contribution resources to open source software. Organizations were the focal point of the survey as we seek to better understand the scale of resources these entities pour into open source every year.

Scale

Challenges

Lessons learned

Leave "fingerprints" on your organization's OSS efforts to help managers, researchers, and other observers more easily collect this information.

Empower employees to self report contributions made under the organization's banner.

Make OSS contribution part of your monitoring pipeline by conducting brief, regular surveys within your organization to collect key metrics.

Consider sharing data to public OSS funding index.

Toolkit

About the survey

The primary audience for the survey included OSPOs, Heads of Engineering and Product, C-Level Executives, and other individuals with a solid understanding of their organization's open source engagement.

This survey was distributed through the Linux Foundation's Research Newsletter and mailing list, GitHub newsletters, social media posts, TODO Group, and outreach to open source leaders.

The survey findings motivate a call to action and lead us to suggest several recommendations to improve open source funding and visibility, including: continuous improvement and measuring contribution, empowering organization culture, and contributing back to public data sources for measuring impact.

⁵ To include a wider audience, we also announced and distributed the survey link via posts on X/Twitter, LinkedIn, and Mastodon. Less than 7% of responses come from these broader social channels.

Start with the key findings of the survey. We build on these takeaways and suggest policy recommendations for improving open source funding insight. Finally, a more detailed discussion⁶ of insights from each survey module is included in Detailed Findings.

How do organizations contribute to open source software?

flowchart LR
  A["🏢 Organizations"] --> B{Funding}
  B --> C("💵 Financial")
  B --> D("🛠  Labor")
  D --> E(("💻 Open Source"))
  C --> E
  E --> F["🏛  Foundations"]
  E --> G["👥 Communities"]
  E --> H["📋 Projects"]
  E --> I["👷 Maintainers"]

A core objective of the survey is to estimate the "value-added" to open source by organizations.

How much does a typical organization contribute to open source?

How is support distributed across different channels?

Can we scale estimates from our survey to capture a wider population of organizations?

We use survey responses to estimate contribution value, taking care to distinguish labor⁷ from direct financial contribution.⁸ In doing so, we can both (a) characterize a typical organization who contributes to open source and (b) extrapolate these findings to establish an aggregate estimate for the value provided to open source by all contributing organizations. This is important because it provides a baseline for the open source ecosystem to understand organizational contribution, funding mechanisms, and provides a way for other organizations to benchmark their own contributions.

⁷ Labor contribution considers the extent to which an organization's employees contribute to open source projects during paid time.

⁸ Direct financial contribution (e.g. "non-code") includes financial resources and other forms of support for OSS, including donations, event sponsorships, discounted services, training, and research.

Deriving dollar estimates from the raw survey responses requires information on the total number of labor hours a firm dedicates to open source work in a year. We discuss our preferred estimation and aggregation methodology to go from survey responses to labor value estimates in the appendix.

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Organizations invest billions in open source

Survey Respondents

159 respondents to the survey collectively contribute $1.7 billion (2023 USD) in annual value to open source. 86% comes in the form of contribution labor by employees.

Extrapolating survey to all organizations active in open source

Using the survey responses on contribution, we estimate that organizations contribute $7.7 billion annually to OSS.

¹⁰ Scaling our estimates of contribution value to all organizations requires a few assumptions. Our primary assumption is that the distribution of organization contribution in the wider population follows the distribution of observed commits to public GitHub repositories made by the employees of organizations. We discuss these in detail in the appendix and show how varying the assumptions could lead to a range of plausible estimates for the total value of organization support for open source.

⁹ 159 organizations from the survey provided either labor or financial contribution information that was greater than zero.

How much do all organizations contribute to open source?

Under a set of varying hypothetical scenarios, Figure 2 plots extrapolations of the OSS contribution value captured in the survey sample to create an estimate for the total value the wider population of OSS organizations contribute to open source each year.

Under our preferred set of assumptions, organizations worldwide contribute over $7.7 billion (2023 USD) to OSS each year.

How can we place these estimates of OSS investment by organizations into context? A number of other studies have sought to place value on either (1) the aggregate value of open source or (2) the scale of investment required to created this value. Their findings help contextualize the estimate we derive for the value of organization-driven contribution to open source (see Figure 3).

Blind et al. (2021) find that companies within the EU invested €1 billion into open source in 2018.

Hoffmann, Nagle, and Zhou (2024) estimate that the one-time cost to redevelop core OSS infrastructure from scratch would require $4.15 billion (2023 USD).

Korkmaz et al. (2024) estimate that aggregate U.S. investment in open source totalled to $37.8 billion in 2019.

Using GitHub commit data linked to organizations by committer email, organizations made nearly 8 million commits to public repositories in the last year of available data. To match $7.7 billion in total annual contribution at an hourly wage of $45, this would imply that employees make 1 commit every 21.4 hours they are paid to work on open source.

Naively scaling the total value captured by the survey ($1.7 billion) to match the estimated number of contributing organizations worldwide (21k) would imply that over ($225 billion invested each year, a value roughly equal to the total wage bill for software developers in the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024)

Blind, Knut, Mirko Böhm, Paula Grzegorzewska, Andrew Katz, Sachiko Muto, Sivan Pätsch, and Torben Schubert. 2021. "The Impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on Technological Independence, Competitiveness and Innovation in the EU Economy." Final Study Report. European Commission, Brussels, Doi 10: 430161.

¹¹ The authors further estimate that this investment generates an additional €65 to €95 billion to union-wide GDP.

Korkmaz, Gizem, J Bayoán Santiago Calderón, Brandon L Kramer, Ledia Guci, and Carol A Robbins. 2024. "From GitHub to GDP: A Framework for Measuring Open Source Software Innovation." Research Policy 53 (3): 104954.

¹² In a notable departure from the present survey, the authors consider investment by U.S.-affiliated developers across 7.6 million public repositories.

¹³ Typically by counting commits made by employees to open source projects.

While the previous studies rely on publicly observed contribution information¹³, the findings of this report are derived from open source contribution estimates self-reported by the organizations themselves.

How can the contribution value from the survey be scaled up for all organizations?

Our survey was targeted towards organizations most likely to support open source. Simply scaling up the total value represented within the survey to match an estimate of the total number of organizations who participate in OSS is likely to overestimate the total value of contribution. To correct this bias, we use a calibrated bootstrap procedure to account for the fact that our survey likely is skewed towards large contributors. We describe our extrapolation methodology in detail in the appendix.

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How much do survey respondents contribute?

In Figure 4, we plot the derived values for labor and financial contribution value for each survey respondent who gave answers the the corresponding questions.

112 respondents provided information on the level of their organization's open source contribution labor. 133 respondents provided information on the level of their organization's financial contribution.¹⁴ Summary statistics for these distributions are presented in Table 1

¹⁴ 192 respondents provided some information for either labor or financial contribution. However, some of these respondents did not provide enough information to derive a proper estimate of contribution using our empirical methodology. 159 respondents provided sufficient information to calculate either financial or labor contribution value.

Labor
112

$12,936,973

$63,175,021

$2,592

$345,600

$622,080,000

$1,448,940,960

Financial
133

$1,796,592

$7,333,217

$600

$175,000

$77,850,000

$238,946,678

The median responding organization contributes $520,600 (2023 USD) of annual value to OSS

$345,600 of this value is in labor, which corresponds to 4 FTE.

$175,000 is made in direct financial contributions.

In aggregate, respondents to the survey contribute $1.7 billion (2023 USD) to open source every year.
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Sources and sinks

What are the various channels of open source funding? Where do organizations channel these resources? The survey allows us to disaggregate the flow of resources from organizations to open source a little further. In Figure 5 we plot the breakdown of total respondent contribution into labor and financial resources. Figure 5 demonstrates the overwhelming share of value contributed to OSS by organization comes from labor.

We disaggregate labor and financial funding further in Figure 6 and Figure 7.

Note some organizations might report both contractor labor and financial resources directed to contractors. To avoid issues of double counting, we choose to exclude contractor labor when estimating the total value of contribution.

It is interesting to note that a significant share of financial contribution is directed towards contractors and suggests that open source contribution work is either done "in house" or by contracting specialists. The survey responses characterizing financial contribution are also consistent with budgetary allocations of major open source non-profits. The allocation of financial resources reported in ( Figure 7 aligns with the Linux Foundation's expenditure shares for 2023 The Linux Foundation 2023).¹⁶
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Organizations have contribution blind spots when it comes to funding specifics

Blind spots for funding specifics

Organizations have a great sense of why they contribute to OSS but seem unlikely to describe the value of this investment in refined detail. This is revealed by a dropoff in relative response rates for questions about funding specifics.

Of the 325 responding organizations who gave information on what types of contributions to they make to open source software projects

55% answered the question "How much financial support does your organization give to OSS in total?"

50% answered the question "Of the employees at your organization that work on OSS, what percentage of their time do they spend working on it?"

46% answered the question "How many employees of your organization work on OSS?"

32% answered the question "How much financial support does your organization give different OSS targets (e.g. projects, maintainers, foundations, etc.)?"

22% answered the question "What percentage of the organization's budget is allocated to OSS?"

20% answered the question "How many total labor hours do employees of your organization spend working on OSS?"

Owing largely to its scale and potential for underreporting, OSS contribution labor is a critical blind spot for organizations.

Respondents seem relatively more knowledgeable of their organization's direct financial contribution compared with labor contribution. Of the 192 respondents who provided some estimates of either financial contributions or labor value

67% gave information on both

33% gave only financial information

1% gave only labor information

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Measuring contribution is more challenging when operations are decentralized

Respondents cite few formal approval channels or other roadblocks to contribution. This is somewhat of a mixed blessing: how can we encourage OSS work but also have some visibility into what employees are working on (for reporting purposes)?

"I work at a large research university - I don't know how the university contributes to open source because there are programmers working in so many areas."

64% of responding organizations do not have an OSPO (7% of respondents didn't know if they had one).

Less than 1/3 of organizations require employees to commit using firm email addresses and a little more than 1/3 strongly encourage it.

Important forms of non-financial, non-code contribution may still go unmeasured.

Compared with full or part time employees, respondents (understandably) seem to know relatively little about the amount of labor hours contractors spend working on open source. On the other hand, the survey also reveals that payments to contractors makes up the largest share of financial contribution by organizations (see Figure 7).

"We're a funder and don't make direct contributions."

"Our devs are gig-workers."

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Sign your organization's OSS efforts with public identifiers to help managers, researchers, and other observers more easily collect this information.

Adopt a policy for employees to author commits using their organization's email address

Consolidate OSS efforts under a public banner

Make OSS use and contribution expectations explicit in public descriptions of organization's roles

¹⁷ For example, place open source projects under a GitHub Organization.

¹⁸ Such as job postings.

Empower employees to self report contributions made under the organization's banner

Encourage employees to time-track and publicize their contributions.

Incentives, recognition, or awards for open source contribution are low cost ways to promote self reporting.

Attract talent by offering and making known opportunities to contribute to open source as part of your recruiting strategy.

Make OSS contribution part of your monitoring pipeline by conducting brief, regular surveys within your organization to collect key metrics.

Keep it simple and quick. Emphasize breadth over width.

Pay particular attention to the amount of OSS labor your employees contribute.

Consider sharing data to public OSS funding index ²⁰ return to top

A public index could be a simple list that tracks the what, where, and how much for your organization's open source investments.

Helps to solidify standardization around contribution reporting.

Fosters a sense of transparency and public access to the data.

In addition to estimate the scale of open source investment by organizations covered in key findings, our survey delved deeper by asking respondents a wide range of questions on code and non-code contribution, motivations and incentives, investment prioritization, and organizational processes. In this section, we discuss more detailed insights gathered from the survey. We begin by first covering the structure and implementation of the survey. Next, we describe characteristics of responding organizations captured in the survey. Finally, we summarize findings for each individual survey module: code condtribution, non-code contribution, motivations and incentives, and investment prioritization and decision-making.

Survey Characteristics

Table 2 summarizes characteristics of the OSS Funding Survey.

Total survey responses

501

Survey start date

June 27 2024

Survey end date

October 17 2024

Survey format

Online (Qualtrics)

Number of questions

47

Outreach

Direct contacts (emails), targeted groups (GitHub blog, LF newsletter), broad channels (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Mastodon)

The study authors collaborated to develop 47 questions across 5 modules²² and targeted an estimated time-to-complete of 19 minutes.²³ While survey outreach tailored towards organizations most likely to significantly contribute to open source, the survey link remained open to the public.²⁴ Distribution channels included direct email contacts, targeted newsletters, and social media posts. The survey was deployed online via Qualtrics beginning June 27th 2024. Through September 25th 2025, we collected 501 distinct responses.²⁵ 58% of responses came from outreach by the Linux Foundation, 24% from GitHub channels, and 18% from other channels.²⁶

²² Survey modules include "Code Contribution", "Non-code Contribution", "Motivations & Incentives", "Investment Prioritization & Decision-making", and "Respondent Descriptives".

²³ Early anecdotal feedback suggested the inaugural survey was too long. Future iterations of the OSS Funding Survey ought to be streamlined to improve response rates.

²⁴ Respondents were only required to confirm they were age 18 or older.

²⁵ Since we allowed respondents to skip questions and leave answers blank, completion rates vary by question.

²⁶ Other channels include social posts on LinkedIn, X, Mastodon as well as direct email contacts. The differences in responses rates by source likely arise from the differences in timing in outreach.

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Respondent Characteristics

Who answered the survey? We asked respondents a series of demographic questions to help get a sense of what kind of organizations are captured in the survey.

Broadly speaking, our survey captures three types of organizations:

Non-profits / government formed with the intention of funding OSS

Smaller startups and businesses focused on developing OSS

Larger businesses that develop as part of their broader strategy

Figure 9 reveals the survey gathers input from firms of all sizes.²⁷ In Figure 10 and Figure 11, we decompose respondents by their industry and operational niche, respectively. The majority (87%) of survey respondents are IT and computing adjacent, for-profit firms. Non-profits and academic institutions make up 13% of respondents. Figure 12 describes where survey respondents are in their open source journey corroborates the notion that most organizations consume open source while a more select few influence the project management and governance of major open source projects. Figure 13 shows the regional coverage skews towards North America and Europe.²⁸ Finally, Figure 14 reveals that, consistent with our choice of distribution targeting, 31% of respondents have an OSPO.

²⁷ The representation of small firms is encouraging for the purposes of our extrapolation size and mitigates some concern that we are oversampling large OSS contributors.

²⁸ Future iterations of the OSS funding survey efforts would do well to expand coverage into underrepresented regions.

Compared with comparable studies of organization who participate in OSS ( Hendrick and Santamaria 2023), the sample from this survey has

Greater representation from smaller firms.

Slightly lower OSPO representation.

Significantly less representation from regions outside of the U.S., Canada, and the EU.

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Code Contribution
Where does your organization contribute open source code?

Organizations are most likely to contribute to repositories that they directly manage (38%) but a close second are projects that are upstream dependencies (34%).

Most firms (39%) contribute daily and 60% of organizations contribute code at least weekly.

There does not seem to be any strong correlation between firm size and frequency of code contribution.

Some survey respondents report infrequent contribution, citing resource constraints and or commitment to other objectives.

"Very seldom do we contribute. We are a non profit. If we were better funded we would allocate more resources to contribute back to the community but we already serve an underrepresented community."

What kind of open source code contributions does your organization make?
Organizations are more likely to contribute in the form of bug reports (19%), features (19%), general maintenance (18%), documentation (16%) than they are to contribute by providing governance (7%), cybersecurity audits (6%), and legal advice (3%).
Who at your organization contributes open source code?
After developer or software engineer (40%), community / developer advocates (17%) and IT / sysadmin / devops roles (11%) are the second and third most likely to contribute.
How does your organization incentivize employees to contribute to open source software projects?
Organizations are diverse when it comes to incentivizing employees to contribute.

"All employees have a rider in their contract that explicitly permits contributions to open source. Some employees ONLY work on open source."

"[My organization give an] annual company award to most impactful contributor"

"...we encourage developers to contribute to OSS as a way to grow their career."

"We don't really 🫣 We're working on it by improving our Open Source Policy + trying to get more folks interested, but it's kinda up to engineers themselves to seek it out (which only optimises for a subset of engineers)."

OSS work is more likely to be part of the employee's job (52%) than the entire job (31%).

Organizations do not seem to cite excessive contribution "red tape": most employees can contribute without explicit approval (38%) or as long as it doesn't interfere with core work (33%).

Relative to larger peers, smaller firms are much more likely to have employees where OSS work is the full time job.

Most organizations (77%) do not pay more for open source contributions above and beyond the employee's normal salary.

Are there any code contribution activities that are not allowed by your organization?

Most organizations (43%) do not report any code contribution types that are explicitly forbidden by their org.

If they do, contributing to projects with particular licensing requirements seems more likely to be prohibited (25%) as is contributing to projects maintained by competitors (10%).

Other roadblocks to contribution include complicated CLAs, project bureaucracy, and projects maintained by competitors.

"Contributions that would disclose company IP"

"Making contributions to project with too much bureacracy"

"Making contributions to projects with overly complicated CLAs"

What is your organization's approval process for employees working on open source projects?
Most respondents say there is not a rigorous approval process to work on OSS projects: only 19% of organizations require explicit approval to contribute and only 11% restrict contribution to a set of pre-approved projects.

"No explicit policy. It's a 'if in doubt, talk to us'"

"This is an afterthought since all they want are the features. Consequences like IP management are not duly considered."

Smaller companies tend to have fewer restrictions over what OSS projects their employees can contribute to.

Concerns about employees contributing to OSS with stringent licensing requirements seems to be more of a concern for larger or.

Contribution restrictions also might vary with the level of contribution itself.

"Employers can contribute minor code changes (bug fixes, improvements) without prior approval. Larger contributions and entire projects need approval."

"Can contribute simple pieces to any project as long as on a broad list of licenses/projects and known CLAs."

Encouraging that some respondents are actively working to improve their review process.

"No clear approval process as of today, but on the way to establish such a process."

Recommendation

Reduce contribution frictions by making your contribution policy clear and encouraging for employees.

At the same time, put a monitoring or self-reporting framework in place so that the scale of your employees' investments into open source can be measured.

Multiple benefits: encourage contribution, reduce business risk, and increase contribution insights!

"Employees must complete training and map their github ID to the company organization before contributing to any public projects on company time."

Does your organization evaluate any particular business risks before allowing employees to contribute to open source projects?

Business risk (in decreasing importance): security (20%), competitive edge (16%), patent risk (15%), technical debt (13%), dependence on external code (13%).

However, 16% of organizations say business risk does not factor into their decision to allow open source contribution from employees.

Distribution of work time allocated to OSS is trimodal: employees who work on OSS typically do so with either 0-15%, 50%, or 100% of their time.

Unfortunately, some organizations might consider excessive open source efforts to be wasteful or otherwise misaligned.

³⁰ This line of thinking motivates a stronger understanding of the ROI of open source investment, especially from the perspective of an individual organization.

"Risk for high amount of waste. Correspondence, pull reviews, etc"

"Supporting otherwise abandoned critical projects."

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Non-code Contribution
How does your organization support open source beyond code contribution?

If respondents make non-code contributions, it's most likely to be through donations (21%), foundation membership (17%), or event sponsorship (14%).

Supporting open source research efforts is another encouraging form of non-code support cited by respondents.

³¹ Breaking the donations category down further, 11% of organizations donate to foundations, non-profits or general funds while 10% donate directly to maintainers or software projects.

"Funding of research projects that contribute to open source code."

"[Sponsoring] working group whitepapers/use cases etc"

Providing speakers is the most common form of event sponsorship (30%) relative to financial sponsorship (22%), marketing (19%), logistics support (15%) or content curation (14%).

If organizations support a foundation, the most cited reason is that the foundation supports open source projects that are useful to them (36%).

There does not seem to be a strong relationship between company size and non-code contribution types.

Non-code contribution is much more sporadic and infrequent compared with code contribution.

Are there any forms of non-code contribution explicitly forbidden by your organization?
Organizations typically do not explicitly forbid any non-code contribution activities: 48% of respondents say nothing is off the table.
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Motivations and Incentives
What are your organization's primary motivations for supporting open source?

Top cited reasons for contributing to open source: concern for project sustainability (10%), giving back (10%), innovation (9%)

When we break these motivations down by by firm size, strategic motivations become more clear:

Small organizations demonstrate a stronger concern for project sustainability and a desire to give back.

Large organizations seem to place more emphasis on risk mitigation, desire to promote standards and interoperability.

"Open Source Contributions help showcase work for consulting engagements."

What are some factors that inhibit your organization's desire to support open source?

Lack of resources, in either labor bandwidth (26%) or money (20%), is the most commonly cited obstacle for organizations to contribute.

On the other hand, organizations seem to know exactly why and how they'd contribute if they had the resources: 38% of respondents say that uncertainty over how to contribute doesn't hold them back in any way.

More than half or organizations reward or recognize employees who contribute to OSS (at least to some extent)

Smaller companies seem more likely to reward or recognize their employees for OSS contribution.

83% of organizations say OSS contribution is at least somewhat important to prospective hires.
The organization's support of OSS seems to be more important for the prospective employees of smaller firms relative to larger firms

To what extent does your organization make code contributions to open source software that is critical to operations?
Smaller firms find OSS support extremely critical to operations while larger firms find it somewhat important.
Does tax exemption status factor into your decision to support open source?
Tax exemption status doesn't appear to be a strong motivation to contribute: 48% of respondents say is plays "no role at all" in determining contribution.
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Investment Prioritization and Decision-making

Respondents highlight the need to durable open source funding streams that place value on all aspects of project development

"We have created several popular and useful open source tools over the years. It is always a struggle to find funding for basic maintenance for these projects. Funding sources like to pay for new features but not closing issues and basic maintenance. It would be good if the Linux Foundation had funding streams for this type of work for projects."

In terms of targets, organizations tend to send the most direct financial support to OSS contractors.

The distribution of the share of an organization's budget that is allocated to open source is bimodal: organizations typically spend either <10% or >90% on open source support.

57% of firms include at least some mention OSS-related expectations in job postings.

In general, response rates for specific labor or financial contribution questions were quite low compared with other questions.

³² After contractors, organizations support (in decreasing order) bounty platforms, foundations, communities, projects, and individual maintainers.

³³ This is consistent respondents representing both for-profit and non-profit enterprises.

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General Remarks from Survey Respondents

"Especially for startups that want to contribute, it'd be great to have more information available about sponsored programs that lend financial support back to sought-after contributions. There are a great many projects that create corporate sponsors that themselves contribute heavily to the open source project, but which then largely don't pay anything out to non-associated contributors, so some sort of more equitable arrangement could make useful contributions even more frequent (especially at my company where I have to balance donating time to open source to actively sourcing revenue for my own business)."

"Your survey has a bias that it wants to measure open source as a profit center, when it's just tools and not accounted that way. I worked at DreamWorks Animation. There, all of our animation software was created in house for Linux. If you asked us how much How to Train Your Dragon profited, how much using Linux made that a film a hit, is that possible to answer? DreamWorks builds all tools in house for competitive advantage. I wrote code working there that the company approved me to release open source later. However, the company prohibited me contributing open source in its name, due to fear of patent trolls mounting vexatious lawsuits."

"A lot of open source communities and orgs seem gatekeepy these days limits involvement."

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Measuring Value of Contribution Labor

We can use survey responses to measure the value of OSS labor contribution from organizations in two ways.

1. Use the question that directly asks how many labor hours employees at their organization contribute to OSS in a year.

2. Use the questions that ask (a) how many employees at the organization contribute to OSS and (b) what percentage of their time these employees spend contributing to OSS projects.

While a direct answer on working hours relies less on interpolation, response rates were much higher for the second approach. We therefore used the following expression to estimate the value of a single organizations labor contribution: \[ \begin{aligned} \text{Annual value of organization's OSS labor} & = (\text{number of OSS employees}) \\ & \times (\text{percentage of time working on OSS}) \\ & \times (\text{working hours in 1 year}) \\ & \times (\text{wage}) \end{aligned} \tag{1}\]

We refer to this approach as Method 3b in Table 3.
Assumptions:

We assume 48 working weeks and 40 working hours per week (1920 hours per year).

Following Hoffmann, Nagle, and Zhou (2024), we assume a global composite hourly wage of $45 for software developers in year 2023.

For the questions on how many employees within the organization contribute to OSS, respondents could select from a set of binned ranges (e.g. 1 to 5, 6 to 10, etc.). We obtain a point estimates for the measures by taking the median of the ranges when they are bounded and the minimum when they are not. For example, if the response category is "1 to 5", we use 3. If the category is "More than 5000", we (conservatively) choose 5000.

As discussed in Method 3b, we count only full and part time employees and assume the organizations answer for the percentage of time employees spend contributing is a group average.

Hoffmann, Manuel, Frank Nagle, and Yanuo Zhou. 2024. "The Value of Open Source Software." Harvard Business School Strategy Unit Working Paper, no. 24-038.

Table 3 contains alternative estimates for the total of annual OSS labor contribution value across all responding organizations. Since the survey asked about the organization's labor contribution in multiple ways, we assess several alternative methods to estimate total labor value.

Method 1: Use reported labor hours only.

Method 2: Use reported labor hours if present, otherwise use number of employees who contribute to OSS and percentage of time spent working on OSS.

Method 3: Use number of employees who contribute to OSS and percentage of time spent working on OSS only.

Method 3b: Full and part time employees 112$1,448,940,960

We prefer estimates from Method 3b since (1) the data is derived from responses to a consistent set of questions, (2) excluding contractor labor avoids double counting, and (3) response rates were higher for these questions than for reported labor hours.

Extrapolation to population of OSS organizations

1. The population distribution of contribution value follows the observed distribution of organization-affiliated commits to public repos.

2. 10% of organizations population-wide who contribute labor to open source, also contribute financial resources.

In order to scale the contribution value captured by the survey to generate an estimate of (( total contribution by orgs, we must first account for the fact that the survey is likely skewed towards large contributors. Indeed roughly half of the survey labor value is driven by one respondent. We address this complication by using a calibrated bootstrap approach Rao, Wu, and Yue 1992; Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024). Our primary assumption is that the population distribution of contribution value follows the observed distribution of organization-affiliated commits to public repositories. Canty 1999). Naively scaling the total value captured by the survey ($1.7 billion) to match the estimated number of contributing organizations worldwide (21k) would imply that over $225 billion invested each year, a value that is roughly equal to the total wage bill for software developers in the United States

Rao, JNK, CFJ Wu, and Kim Yue. 1992. "Some Recent Work on Resampling Methods for Complex Surveys." Survey Methodology 18 (2): 209-17.

Canty, Angelo J. 1999. "Resampling-Based Variance Estimation for Labour Force Surveys." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series D: The Statistician 48 (3): 379-91.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U. S. Department of Labor. 2024. "Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers." https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm.

³⁴ This is the latest full year of organization-matched data that was available at the time of publication.

³⁵ For example, a commit is made by an author with the email jdoe@microsoft.com is associated with Microsoft.

We begin with a sample of organization-affiliated commits to public GitHub repositories from April 2022 through April 2023.³⁴ Individual commits can be matched to organizations by linking the domain name of the commit author's email address to organizations domain, under the assumption that that employee is contributing to open source as on behalf of their employer.³⁵ We next use this sample to approximate how many organizations contribute to open source each year. This is operationalized by taking a threshold of (X) annual commits and counting the set of (N) firms who made (X) total commits over the past year. We then use (N) as the size of our total population.

We next use this distribution of (N) firms and their annual commit totals as a ground truth population distribution which we seek to mimic in our bootstrap sampling procedure. We bin this distribution and calculate relative frequencies for each bin. These relative frequencies are then used as resampling weights to draw bootstrap sample, of size (N) from the empirical sample of labor contribution values.³⁶ We repeat this process to draw a bootstrapped sample of size (0.1 N) from the empirical sample of financial contribution values. The assumption here is that 10% percent of organizations with employees who contribute their labor to open source also make financial contributions. Finally, the bootstrap estimates for the sums of these distributions are combined to form an estimate of the total annual contribution value for all OSS contributing organizations.

³⁶ Specifically, we draw (10,000) bootstrap samples with replacement of size (N).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2024 Open Source Software Funding Report

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This report summarizes insights from the inaugural 2024 Open Source Software Funding Survey, a collaboration between GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and researchers from Harvard University. The objective of the survey was to better understand how organizations fund, contribute to, and otherwise support open s ource software.

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Can we imagine new forms of finance that structurally & philosophically support ecological, social and local needs?

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The Persimmon Collective Fund helps resource and support beginning and existing BIPOC farmers and land stewards through funding support, technical support, and by nurturing an ecosystem that uplifts and values an in-depth cultural lens to build relationships with individuals and collectives of farmers in NC, SC, GA and VA.

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Deciding Together: Shifting Power Through Participatory Grantmaking

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Deciding Together: Shifting Power Through Participatory Grantmaking

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This guide explores how participatory grantmaking (PGM) shifts funding decisions from foundations to the communities most impacted by those decisions. Rather than treating communities as beneficiaries, PGM empowers them as co-decision-makers, embedding values of equity, trust, and inclusion.

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The intersection of food and tech sovereignty 

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The intersection of food and tech sovereignty 

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An exploration of D:food/web at DWeb Camp 2024.

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What would it look like to build a

In August 2024, a transdisciplinary group of contributors in the public goods funding, technology, farming and food systems spaces gathered in Navarro, California. Our purpose was to develop a vision for the future of agriculture, its supporting technologies, and how we might go about resourcing the first steps towards it. While this vision is still coming into focus, it's one we're committed to grounding in the ethos of the commons, recognizing the need for restoring community-ownership in agricultural systems and its supporting technologies. The following site synthesizes and documents the first of three D:Food collaborations taking place to develop a pilot commons funding mechanism. In addition to tool development, these collaborations explore cooperative structures that can govern their use, the ethics of who owns and controls the data used in these technologies, and how to sustainably fund open source projects in the long term. The following documentation is a nascent vision for the agricultural technology commons and exploration of why this model is not only needed, but likely to become the status quo in coming years.

Agriculture is a multi-generational, shared human endeavor and arguably humankind's first major innovation; one that has catalyzed widespread cultural and economic change by fundamentally altering our relationship to land and with each other. However, it has also gradually been forced into a siloed, monopolized and privatized environment.

Decentralized software systems-where no single server or authority is in charge-are often described as a new technology. But they echo an organizational structure that is quite old: the commons. For much of human history, communities shared and managed resources, like land, water, and knowledge, through collective stewardship and coordination. Today's peer-to-peer systems revive that tradition in digital form, enabling people to coordinate, exchange, and govern together without relying on centralized authorities. In a world where platforms control speech, access, and value, the return of networked governance and infrastructure is becoming more of a necessity, and increasingly, the more effective choice.
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Beginning in the 12th century, and accelerating in the 18th and 19th, the enclosure of the commons reshaped much of Europe. Lands once managed collectively, as was the practice in many other parts of the world, were fenced off, privatized, and transformed into sources of profit and taxation. Soon enclosure become a blueprint for colonial expansion and industrial capitalism, displacing many communities as widely as Indonesia and Brazil. Today, a new kind of enclosure is occurring. Instead of land, it's our digital spaces and tools. The platforms we rely on for banking, communication, navigation, and many other everyday needs are privately owned, opaque, and perhaps as a result, brittle, as they collapse under their own weight. At any a time, a company or country can freeze your account or cut off access to these services and tools. I would argue that open source is not just a nicety for maintaining complex, critical software, but the most effective way. Many hands make light work, but only if they can sufficiently coordinate their tasks. What started as the loss of the physical commons has now entered the digital realm, and in the world of agriculutre, both have had tangible impacts on our systems of food production.

Innovation today currently relies on a handful of well-established funding models: government and academia fuel policy programs and fundamental research, but are often influenced by changing political and institutional priorities. Corporate R&D departments push technological boundaries forward, but are generally restricted to market demand and profitability; venture capital boosts startups on the path to rapid growth along with a promise to meet high return/exit expectations with these high-growth, high-return goals often at odds with customer needs and best interests. And philanthropic grants, which are often a byproducts or excesses from these previous systems, that fund socially valuable work though with limited commercial appeal and financial sustainability and deeply tied to philanthropic program interests.

The commons offers an alternative to the usual binary of public versus private ownership. One that's rooted in collective benefit, competitive collaboration and long-term stewardship. In agriculture-and likely many other fields-the barrier to meaningful change isn't a lack of technology or good intentions. When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press it was to democratize knowledge, it was only a matter of time before the same tool was used to spread lies, inflame divisions, or consolidate power. Again and again, we've seen that technical advances alone don't deliver lasting impact. What's often missing is a deeper reflection on the systems we build within: the protocols of ownership, control, and benefit distribution that shape every innovation. As we develop this funding mechanism for the ag-tech commons, we invite you to not just imagine better tools, but to help design the social and economic contexts that make those tools truly transformative.
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We're only beginning to understand what's possible when systems operate without a central authority. Open networks introduce new forms of coordination: emergent behaviors shaped by the structure of interactions between peers. In nature, we see versions of this pattern everywhere. Mycorrhizal fungi quietly support 92% of plant families through underground exchange networks. Neurons in the brain communicate without a single command center. Ant colonies make complex decisions without a leader. These are all examples of swarm intelligence, or coordinated patterns that emerge from simple rules and dense peer-to-peer interaction. If we design human networks with similar principles-prioritizing shared scaffolding over centralized control-we may unlock new social, civic, and economic outcomes not possible in hierarchical systems.

What might a modern-day commons look like and how could open networks be governed in ways that promote shared benefit? We have plenty of examples to pull from, quietly shaping the world around us: cooperatives, democratically owned and controlled by worker-members, on average see lifespans over twice that of traditional businesses. Open source software forms the backbone of global digital infrastructure and decentralized technologies and cryptographic protocols are reducing the need for traditional intermediaries or middlemen in many types of transactions and communications. These experiments, new and established, are signals of what's possible when systems are designed for collective agency rather than centralized control.

A networked, peer-to-peer approach shifts us from simply having good intentions to rigorously examining how power flows: Who owns what? Who controls the system? Who benefits from success? Unlike traditional models that aim to design the perfect solution up front, networked systems ask us to build the right scaffolding-the structures and incentives that allow better outcomes to emerge over time. This means focusing less on dictating specific moves, and more on defining the rules of the game: the affordances, constraints, and feedback loops that shape behavior. In a modern-day commons, success isn't about picking the right players. It's about designing the right ruleset to create the right conditions for fairness, adaptability, and positive-sum dynamics, no matter who's playing.

Our food systems are at a turning point. For centuries, agriculture was rooted in shared knowledge, land, and labor. That commons-based approach gave way to industrial systems that have evolved to become centralized and extractive. Network-based innovations present an opportunity to come full circle in our journey from communal farming to industrial agriculture; a chance to reimagine the agricultural commons for the 21st century.

Rithikha Rajamohan, civic technologist and founder of V6A Labs . D:Food contributor, synthesis and documentation.

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The following documentation was synthesized through a collaborative process, pulling from many ideas, components and thoughts put forth by contributors in the wider food systems and agricultural technology ecosystem. We welcome open contributions to this work as the development of the pilot funding and governance mechanism evolves.
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The Decentralized Food Web, or D:Food Web for short, is a series of in-person engagements that explores how to bridge decentralized web and tech sovereignty organizing with the long-standing decentralized, global food sovereignty movements. The first of the collaborations was nested in the broader gathering of DWeb Camp 2024, which examined technologies and strategies to promote food sovereignty through empowering smallholder farmers, workers, and agricultural coops around the world.

The following design principles were synthesized from our discussions as certain guiding ideas and terms continued to resurface. This website is a living document and an evolving process. The outcomes from each collaboration, including this documentation, are intended to spark further dialogue, invite critical feedback, and encourage bold, practical thinking as the pilot develops.
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A preliminary sketch of a funding and governance mechanism was proposed during the first collaboration process and the contextual need for participatory approaches was established. This early-stage concept is part of an ongoing, iterative process that welcomes further input and refinement from the community.

While the current proposal outlines three major components - Public Utility, Enterprise, and the Exit to Commons Framework - this current sketch only serves as a starting point for future discussions. Our goal is to design a non-extractive agricultural technology commons and we recognize there are other approaches, perspectives, and potential components that have not yet been fully explored or incorporated. This is where continued engagement from the community becomes crucial.

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Public Utility

The Utility Layer emerged from the need for a more collaborative, open, and values-driven approach to development in sectors with significant public interest, like agriculture. It was developed to provide a framework for creating and managing shared resources that benefit a wide range of stakeholders. By establishing a neutral ground, the Utility Layer enables diverse stakeholders to come together and work on common challenges.

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The Public Utility Layer is built on a values-focused Charter, which aligns agricultural technology development around common values and outputs to align the agricultural technology space around FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse) in practice and its application to agriculture. This layer sits alongside and collaborates with external entities and communities, and has three main components which make it unique: the operating agreement (Charter), the community (Signatories), working groups (Focus Areas).

Read More: D:Food Utility + Enterprise Concept Note
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Charter (Operating Agreement, Manifesto, Values Statement)
Defines common values
Signatories (Members)
Those who believe in and will follow those values.
Stewardship Council (Board)
Implements the will of the Signatories through the creation, modification, and/or closure of Focus Areas.
Staff
Dedicated personnel from the Stewardship Council who oversee and provide the administrative and organizational structure to implement the work of the Focus Areas.
Advisory Council
External, non-signatory groups who provide advice on information and strategy to the board. May include governments, academia, businesses, etc.
Focus Areas ("Balloon Factory")
Uniquely structured, semi-independent working groups, funded by stakeholders and focused on a specific topic area to produce Focus Group Outputs. An example structure could be a co-op or DAO.
Focus Group Outputs ("Balloons")
Documents like specifications, requirements, general learning; technical documents like schemas, standards, ontologies; software like reference implementations. Does not include full, commercial, user-oriented software outputs.
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The Focus Areas are funded by those interested in the topic. A percentage of Focus Area funding goes back to the Utility organization to fund the Staff to maintain, grow, etc. The Community of Companies may also generate value (ownership dividends or exit events, revenue %, etc.) which is returned to the Utility.

Enterprise

A pathway was needed to translate outputs from the Utility Layer into tangible products and services, and so the enterprise layer was proposed to serve as a bridge between ecosystem needs and commercial viability. In order for the commons mechanism to be viable, market-oriented entities need to be able to deliver and scale solutions effectively. By providing a pathway for turning collaborative innovations into market-ready solutions, the enterprise layer creates a supportive ecosystem for aligned companies to grow while ensuring commercial development remains connected to identified values and needs.
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The Enterprise layer is a values, technology, market, and incentive aligned Community of Companies delivering services to the Agricultural Sector. The Community membership is expanded through a Venture Studio and Request for Need, which supports alignment of incoming companies while also maintaining an semi-open door into the ecosystem.

Read More: D:Food Utility + Enterprise Concept Note
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Fund
A set of aligned investors funding the Incubator and expected returns are < 10% per year. Investors should include, but not be limited to, key members of the end user community like growers, industry associations (often bio regionally oriented), as well as social + impact investors, or more generally investors who benefit as much from the outcome as the investment.
Venture Studio
A fund-backed venture studio model to help the Community of Companies grow and succeed. It does this by coordinating Requests for Need and by running the Intake Process for the Community of Companies, generating alignment and product readiness for new members.
Request for Need (Proposal Request)
A Request for Need is a needs-driven entrypoint for a new company or organization to join the Community of Companies. The requests are Informed by the Community of Companies, the Utility, other ag tech entities.
Intake Process
The process of ensuring that new members are maximally aligned to the needs of the Community of Companies and vice versa.
Community of Companies
Companies aligned through incentives (equity, ownership, shared revenue, board representation, etc.) and shared values (Charter). This alignment could generate interoperability, shared software maintenance, branding / marketing / sales, or other core services based on need.
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The Companies should be market-oriented (income-generating) and are responsible for securing independent long term funding after their incubation. The Venture Studio is funded through its investors and potentially returns from the Community of Companies' profit.

Exit to Commons (ExC)

The need for Exit to Commons arose from recognizing that conventional exit strategies often lead to technologies being commercialized in ways that don't serve their original communities or purposes. By providing this alternative exit strategy, ExC aims to create a flywheel effect where successful technologies feed back into the commons, fostering more innovation and creating a self-sustaining ecosystem of open, collaborative agricultural technology development.

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Exit to the Commons (ExC) is a strategy for managing stranded IP - intellectual property created by those with domain knowledge but lacking means to commercialize it. A public benefit entity (Cookie Monster) holds IP under a CopyFair license, which requires reciprocity in markets that commercialize mutualized/commons-based knowledge. As products mature, their IP is acquired by the Cookie Monster. Companies use the IP through license agreements, with investors receiving capped returns and revenues partially returning to Cookie Monster as fees. ExC incentivizes knowledge-holders to operationalize insights through a self-sustaining collective commons, providing a commons-aligned approach to IP management and exit strategies.

More Details: Exit to the Commons Concept Note (ExC)
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Cookie Monster
An entity representing a governed collective commons mandated to acquire promising IP aligned with charter values.
Collaboration Monster
A concept describing a process of deploying a Copyfair trademark for aligned tech initiatives, creating a commons that establishes favorable collaboration for inward partners.
Exit To Commons (ExC)
Exit to Commons provides an alternative to Exit to Community (E2C) and Exit to Open (E2O) models, as well as other traditional exit options. Decoupling IP from companies allows for more autonomy while fostering collaboration, essentially creating a self-replenishing collective commons of IP. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations could also be an aligned organizational structure for managing funds and governance with diverse stakeholders. Challenges include initial funding and establishing effective governance structures. An initial fund could be catalyzed by philanthropic resources, creating a form of reverse accumulation where private capital seeds a commons.

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Exit to Commons provides an alternative to Exit to Community (E2C) and Exit to Open (E2O) models, as well as other traditional exit options. Decoupling IP from companies allows for more autonomy while fostering collaboration, essentially creating a self-replenishing collective commons of IP. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, democratically owned digital organizations without geographic restrictions in membership and activities, could also be an aligned organizational structure for managing funds and governance with diverse stakeholders. Challenges include initial funding and establishing effective governance structures. An initial fund could potentially be catalyzed by philanthropic resources, creating a form of reverse accumulation where private capital seeds a commons.

JOURNEY THROUGH THE
MECHANISM

ILLUSTRATED BY ANNA LYNTON

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What would it look like to build a In August 2024, a transdisciplinary group of contributors in the public goods funding, technology, farming and food systems spaces gathered in Navarro, California. Our purpose was to develop a vision for the future of agriculture, its supporting technologies, and how we might go about resourcing the first steps towards it.

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Drawing on rich historical research, Silvia Federici maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the “new enclosures” at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation.

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Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

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This collection centers on women and reproductive work as crucial to both economic survival and the construction of a world free from the hierarchies and divisions of capital.