New on Glasspockets: Open Knowledge Feature Added to Glasspockets Profiles

Janet Camarena is director of transparency initiatives for Foundation Center

Janet Camarena photoWho has glass pockets when it comes to knowledge? Answering this question using our Glasspockets profiles just became a lot easier, thanks to a new feature we’ve added to emphasize the importance of creating a culture of shared learning in philanthropy. Beginning today, Glasspockets profiles are featuring a tie-in with our ongoing #OpenForGood campaign, designed to encourage open knowledge sharing by foundations.

All Glasspockets profiles now have a dedicated space to feature the knowledge that each foundation has contributed to IssueLab, which is a free, open repository that currently provides searchable access to nearly 24,000 knowledge documents. Currently, 67 of the 93 profiles on Glasspockets showcase recently shared reports on IssueLab. For example, looking at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Glasspockets profile reveals that it is participating in the #OpenForGood movement; a window appears on the right side of its profile featuring the latest learning the foundation has shared on IssueLab.

"Sharing your knowledge via open repositories is openness that is good for you and good for the field."

This window on shared knowledge is a dynamic feed generated from our IssueLab database, so if you have published evaluations or other publications to share that are not showing up in your profile, simply go to IssueLab to upload these documents, or contact our Glasspockets team for assistance. And if your foundation invested specifically in monitoring and evaluating results, you can share those evaluations in our new IssueLab: Results. To acknowledge your efforts for sharing your recent evaluations, your foundation will receive an #OpenforGood badge to display on your website and on your Glasspockets profile to signal your commitment to creating a community of shared learning.

Though not a formal part of the transparency assessment, the #OpenForGood feature makes profile users aware of the kinds of learning that are available from participating foundations. Besides linking to the two most recent reports, a shortcut is also provided linking the user to a landing page of all of that foundation’s available knowledge documents.

OFG Everyone Learns GroupSince Glasspockets began, the transparency self-assessment has tracked whether foundations make available a central landing page of knowledge on their own websites, and that will continue to be included moving forward. So what’s the difference here? Opening up your knowledge on your own website is great for people who already know about your institution and visit your website, but it doesn’t really help to spread that knowledge to peers and practitioners unaware of your work. The fragmentation of knowledge across thousands of websites doesn’t do much to accelerate progress as a field—but that’s where open repositories like IssueLab come in.

Open repositories have several things going for them that truly live up to the idea of being #OpenForGood. First of all, any report you make available on IssueLab becomes machine-readable, so it can more easily be used and built upon by others doing similar work. Secondly, once a resource has been added to IssueLab, it becomes part of the sector’s collective intelligence, feeding through an open protocol system, which integrates with systems like WorldCat in 10,000+ public libraries, which means students, academics, journalists, and the general public can easily find the knowledge you’ve generated and shared, even if they’ve never heard of IssueLab, Foundation Center, or your organization. Once in the system, your knowledge resources can also be issued something called a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), so you can track access and use of that knowledge in an ongoing way.

The easiest way to think of it is that sharing your knowledge via open repositories is openness that is good for you and good for the field. So how about it? What will you #OpenForGood?

--Janet Camarena

About the author(s)

Senior Director of Learning Experience
Candid