How to do curating - Basic literacy in commoning

dear Mike

there are two places to find info on biophysical accountability,

i.e.here on the general topic https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Thermodynamic_Efficiencies (with also https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Sustainable_Manufacturing)

and https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Accounting for the accounting systems specifically

I also recommend checking out https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Mutual_Coordination

and as for James Quilligan

he is all over our wiki, as he should be, i.e .about a dozen titles and several dozen text mentions,

see https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?search=Quilligan&title=Special%3ASearch&fulltext=1

bring him on

being explored here https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Relational , https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Facilitation, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Intelligence

curation is something you do yourself, stewardship is what supports others to do the curation ?

as for grandchildren you are probably familiar with john heron's take on the evolution of hierarchy, autonomy , cooperation

and this is pertinent as well: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Evolution_of_Childhood_and_Parenting_Practices

that message was never sent, it stayed in draft mode, really sorry

it has to be starting at 9 pm for me, I'm rarely there before ..

so we need another day and time, sorry for that

Apart from sorting out whatever happened with the comment, I'm very happy to see discussions on P2PF content taking place on Loomio, which is a much better medium. Would you like me to link to this discussion at the end of the post? (Or @asimong can do it too)

Done, thanks for the prompt, Stacco @staccotroncoso

With respect to both @mikeh8 and @michelbauwens1 I'd like to try bottoming out the distinction between (the overlapping concepts of) curation and stewardship, and I'm trying to move on from my earlier statement that I hadn't yet made a distinction.

It makes sense to me, along with Michel, that curation is in effect a relationship between a person and some resource, often in our discussions (though not always) an information resource. A phrase that is often repeated in definitions of curation is "select, organize, and look after" collections of items. This fits well the two examples in my P2PF post, so I'm happy with the word and its meaning here. Especially in the context of the P2PF wiki, the task of writing and maintaining category pages seems to me to fit well into the definition of curation. If you have an introductory page on some concept, not only will you be looking around carefully for which pages give detail to the concept, but also you may be helping to keep those particular selected pages up to date.

Stewardship seems to me to differ from curation partly in being a wider concept, but perhaps more precisely in that while stewardship definitely includes "looking after" or taking care of something, to me there is no implication of selection. So one can "steward" a process of "curating": the curation would be of the data, and stewardship would be of the processes around that data. Wikipedia gives "Stewardship is now generally recognized as the acceptance or assignment of responsibility to shepherd and safeguard the valuables of others."

We probably see ourselves as stewards of the natural world, in the sense of looking after it, including all its natural diversity, and trying not to interfere in destructive ways. We can curate a collection in a museum of dead specimens, but the concept of curation doesn't quite fit looking after living things, because the 'selection' part of curation might imply that we simply ignore, discard or even throw away the items (species or individuals) that are not of value to us.

The process of curation by people is also alive, so we steward that process rather than curate it. Back in relation to my blog post, we can take up the responsibility of stewardship of the culture, or the economy, of distributed curation.

Another nice aspect of the concept of stewardship distinguishes it from ownership and (more autocratic forms of) management. As a steward of the natural environment, I make no claim to own it; nor do I presume that I (personally) have the authority or capacity to take a controlling managerial position with it.

It might be an idea to elaborate this in respect to commons thinking. Does either of you (or anyone else) know of any writing about this? I can imagine an outline easily enough. It might help people understand more about commons processes and how we relate to them personally.

it's a very useful distinction, but they are also polarities and sometimes a person or group needs to do both,

also polarity , because many stewards would actually intervene when the eco=system itself is actually at risk (think about invasive species, which many ecological stewards feel strongly towards, eventhough they are not positive curating per se

so negative curation, in the sense of protecting the integrity of the eco-system, seems part of stewardship, certainly is part of the work of open source maintainers and knowledge editors

I'm a curator when I select myself, but a steward concerning the open contributions of others,

never forget that some people and forces actually want to destroy your commons, for all sorts of reasons

this is why un-moderated lists, where everything goes, don't survive

Michel