John Meluso, assistant teaching professor in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering’s Systems Engineering Program, is lead author on a new perspective paper discussing the history of “openness” and offering guidance on how organizations and researchers can use and manage open practices effectively.
Published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Meluso and eight collaborators from institutions in the U.S., U.K., New Zealand and Germany define open practices as actions that influence transparency (who can see information), inclusion (who can voice perspectives) and decision rights (who can make decisions). Comparing openness across several fields including science, software and education, the team synthesized practical recommendations for leading open organizations.
Recognizing that making an organization more open does not automatically yield desired benefits, the authors note that careful management should be applied to practices of openness. Transparency, inclusion and decision rights are not independent and frequently conflict with one another. Consequently, pursuing any one to an extreme can produce undesirable outcomes in the others. For example, mandates that seek to increase transparency, trust and readership (such as in open-access publishing), often require financial support from individuals or organizations. This can reinforce exclusion by making it harder for under-resourced institutions to participate.
The team identified four categories of design decisions that help leaders manage common challenges that open organizations face, including defining goals, allocating power, sharing information and setting norms. Addressing each, they identified seven lessons that have proven successful across fields for effectively designing open practice:
- Identify specific, feasible openness goals
- Choose information tools with flexible permission controls
- Preserve strategically important information
- Document power structures, contributions and compensation
- Adopt a code of conduct with accessible language, graduated sanctions, mandatory training seminars and conflict resolution mechanisms
- Review and monitor
- Make adjustments to align practices with goals
The paper illustrates these lessons through two case studies: the Global Open Education Resources Graduate Network, an international open education organization that developed its code of conduct collaboratively and monitors practices through annual member surveys; and the Python programming language, which evolved from a single founder’s mailing list into the world’s most popular coding language through deliberate organizational adaptations, including forming a nonprofit, adopting a transparent proposal process and eventually transitioning to a democratically elected steering council.
Meluso believes the study’s recommendations have the potential to make science more transparent and trustworthy and could also make open communities more resilient to participant burnout and funding uncertainty.
“Documenting important work – making labor visible, so to speak – makes burnout less likely and tells an organization who’s performing valuable work,” he said. “So, when people do experience burnout or funding dries up, leaders can adjust with full knowledge of what they stand to lose.”
Going forward, the authors suggest that more interdisciplinary research, as well as collaborations between researchers and practitioners, are necessary to address emerging challenges for openness.
“Open communities and societies all over the world are finding themselves struggling with similar problems.” Meluso said. “How do norms and reward systems affect openness? How does artificial intelligence impact open systems? We’ll need creative new case studies, mixed-methods designs, as well as archival and other analyses to really answer the hardest questions.”
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
