Invited editors: Enric Senabre and Núria Ferran
Instructions for authors: /en/authors-guidelines
The current range of possibilities for knowledge co-creation (or collaborative creation) represents a phenomenon that provides a new way of connecting scientific disciplines, contemporary challenges, social actors and the wide range of collective approaches to doing things, problem-solving and learning.
One of the best initiatives out there for openly and collaboratively creating and sharing knowledge on a global scale is Wikipedia, which will be celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2021. The altruistic project has landed a spot on the internet’s top ten most visited sites, thereby highlighting the potential to share huge amounts of knowledge in a decentralized way and, in doing so, outshining other more dated, centralized models. Meanwhile, recent times have witnessed the emergence of a range of initiatives seeking to involve citizens in scientific pursuits, with instances of transdisciplinarity such as citizen science and open science. Mention must also be made of the initiatives and spaces that have been popping up to pool knowledge and apply it to real-life situations; these include citizen labs, fab labs and fabrication athenaeums, and new participation-based projects carried out by public libraries. Moreover, a number of collaborative tools and platform economy initiatives have recently emerged. Beyond their usefulness with respect to contemporary goods and services, these new tools and initiatives generate valuable knowledge (or have the potential to do so) thanks to the collaboration between people. These examples only skim the surface of current initiatives. Thus, we can firmly state that co-creation and open knowledge are ever more tightly tied together.
However, there continue to be pressing challenges surrounding the who, the how and the why of knowledge co-creation, both in online environments and face-to-face settings. We also require more metaknowledge in this regard, meaning knowledge about the co-created knowledge itself and the methodologies, principles and conditions that make it possible. At the same time, we need further reflection and more critical perspectives and long-term outlooks focused on the unresolved technology, gender, training and participation issues hindering knowledge co-creation. We should also strive to uncover what type of knowledge (and subsequent usefulness) is most easily generated within this framework, whether in academic, labour, community or political spheres (to name a few), and what type of knowledge will thus be left out.
Considering the abovementioned points, the present monograph is open to contributions in the form of articles honing in on any of the following topics of knowledge co-creation (or any topic of a similar nature) from a methodological, conceptual or practical perspective. Contributors may be researchers, academic experts, or professionals or participants in co-creation initiatives, as long as they follow BiD’s formatting guidelines and instructions for authors.
- Wikipedia revised: new approaches or advancements in the project (or any other project carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation) to mark its 20th anniversary.
- Transdisciplinarity and participation in research: citizen science, open science, the research-action interface or any other science-related collaborative field.
- Analysis of the flow of information, documentation and decision-making in decentralized organizations involved in knowledge co-creation.
- Experiences with and models of face-to-face co-creation: hackathons, co-writing sprints, creative retreats, participatory workshops, edit-a-thons, etc.
- Criticism and exclusionary barriers within co-creation: gender or culture gaps, diversity integration, the digital divide, difficulties reaching goals, etc.
- Co-created cultural experiences as a way of learning and sharing knowledge: participatory theatre, digital art, performance art, exhibitions, etc.
- Digital co-creation spaces (tools, platforms or specific online communities) or face-to-face ones (citizen labs, fab labs and fabrication athenaeums, living labs, new museum or library models, etc).
- The platform economy and the generation of shared knowledge, beyond the distributed exchange of goods and services.
Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative works). They may be consulted and distributed freely provided that the author and publisher are quoted (in accordance with the “Recommended citation” section in each of the articles). However, no derivative works (translation, change of format, etc.) may be made without the publisher’s permission. Therefore, it meets the definition of open access form the Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration. The journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions and to retain publishing rights without restrictions.