Crafting A Better Tap of Knowledge

Gabriela Fitz is director of knowledge management initiatives at Foundation Center. This post is part of the Glasspockets’ #OpenForGood series in partnership with the Fund for Shared Insight. The series explores new research and tools, promising practices, and inspiring examples showing how some foundations are opening up the knowledge that they are learning for the benefit of the larger philanthropic sector. Contribute your comments on each post and share the series using #OpenForGood.

This past weekend, I went to visit an old meat packing plant in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. The plant, renamed “Plant Chicago,” serves as a workshop and food production space, playing host to a number of micro-enterprises including a brewery and bakery. But it wasn’t the beer or even the pies that drew me there. It was their tagline, “Closed Loop, Open Source.”

If you know me (or the work of IssueLab at all), you know why I couldn’t resist. The closed loop approach is all about a circular economy, where we take “waste from one process and re-purpose it as inputs for another, creating a circular, closed-loop model of material reuse.” It’s a simple principle and one that I imagine most of us would get behind.

But what’s not so simple is building and maintaining those closed loop systems so that people begin to see (and taste) the benefits. Standing in the lobby of Plant Chicago it was painfully clear to me that circular economies, whether they are in food production or in knowledge production, require more than just good intentions.

Just as I started to feel the familiar weight of trying to execute systems change, I spotted a small sketch of a pyramid amongst a number of technical diagrams and development plans covering a large wall. This simple sketch was similar to a model many of you are probably familiar with but  is still worth describing. In the sketch, the base of the pyramid was labeled “beliefs and values.” The next level up was “practices and actions.” The top of the pyramid was “results.”

When it comes to the closed loop we care so much about at IssueLab, we keep seeing organizations try to skip from beliefs to results. The social sector wants shared learning without sharing; collective impact without collectivized intelligence. But open knowledge - like any sector-wide or organizational change - has to include a change in practices, not just beliefs. If we don’t adopt open knowledge practices, we can’t expect to see the results we hope for: improved program design and delivery at the community level or less duplication of avoidable mistakes. If we truly want to live up to the #OpenForGood ideal, our beliefs and values are simply not sufficient. (Note that the definition of closed loop I quote above is not about beliefs, it’s about actions, relying on verbs like “take,” “re-purpose,” and “create.”)

The good news is that we have the infrastructure to make a circular knowledge economy possible. We’ve built the plant. Tools like open licenses and open repositories were designed to facilitate and support change in knowledge sharing practices, making it easier for foundations to move up the levels of the pyramid.

Now, we just need to start taking a couple simple actions that reflect our beliefs and move us towards the results we want to see. If you believe in the #OpenForGood principle that social sector knowledge is a public good from which nonprofits and foundations can benefit, your foundation can: 1) use open licensing for your knowledge products, and 2) earn an #OpenForGood badge by sharing your knowledge products, like evaluations, through IssueLab’s open repository. Once those practices are as much part of the normal way of doing foundation business as cutting checks and producing summary reports are, we can all sit back and enjoy that beer, together.

--Gabriela Fitz