Building a Knowledge Commons: How We Got Here
A lot of data that’s available is largely inaccessible — which is why CSEI and the Rainmatter Foundation are working on a system that addresses knowledge gaps.
Anu Sridharan and Rishabh Verma
For human settlements to thrive in a warming world, planning must be informed by a deep understanding of local ecologies. For this, access to the right information is key.
Which is why we are building a digital knowledge commons platform that has environmental data across different categories as well as analytical tools that provide insights to users. Our aim is to make change-making more effective by empowering these users with the right set of tools and information.
This project is currently being anchored by the Rainmatter Foundation and the Centre for Social and Environment Innovation but we expect many more to join us soon.
We’re Hiring: Project Manager for the Knowledge Commons Initiative
We started noticing many of these knowledge gaps while working within the Rainmatter and CSEI-ATREE ecosystem. But as we go ahead with building an open knowledge commons platform, we see it being owned and governed on the principles of managed commons where it is for all and by all.
While we are at very early stages of what is poised to be an invaluable asset in the environmental action space in India, we feel that it is necessary to first explain how our rationale for a knowledge commons evolved. We will explain in detail the principles governing this space in subsequent posts.
Read | We Need to Manage Water Better to Ensure Drinking Water Security
It all started with CSEI’s discussions on water management early last year. Water data scarcity remains a problem in India because, for one, we simply don’t have the data we need to answer important questions, and two, our institutions and agencies are not set up to enable water resource management. We identified five key bottlenecks:
- The administrative bottleneck: Water management is split between different agencies and the scale at which the government works may be too large to plan for specific drinking water schemes at the village-level.
- The knowledge bottleneck: Communities have traditional wisdom about how water resources in their region traditionally behaved. But when ‘new’ challenges are introduced by modernisation such as dams, borewells, or industrial pollution, old wisdom may break down. We need new capacity to blend old wisdom with modern science-based approaches. Often context-specific answers to what works and doesn’t work can be found within the same bio-region.
- The data bottleneck: It is surprisingly hard to find consolidated data on water resources, because this involves pulling together different types of data — sensor measurements for groundwater or tank levels, farm surveys or well-pumping records for water abstraction. But often, there are gaps, making it difficult to reconstruct the whole water balance.
- The expertise bottleneck: Creating a water budget involves specialised knowledge. There is a need to build tools (and train communities to use them) to demystify the science and simplify complex analytical tasks, without affecting their accuracy.
- The communication bottleneck: There is a perception that research is only credible if it is presented as a peer-reviewed publication. As a result, the vast majority of the data collected never gets published at all. There is a real need to create new forms of communication of data — that are credible, verifiable, and easy to generate.
We decided to dig deeper into these knowledge, data and expertise bottlenecks. In collaboration with our partners — the India Climate Collaborative (ICC) — we interviewed 21 civil society organisations (CSOs) and 11 philanthropic organisations to get a clearer picture of what’s preventing scalable action on the ground.
Here are four key learnings and our possible solutions:
Manual data collection
40–80% of resources (time and money) go into manual data collection in the absence of digital tools.
Solution: Build capacity on digital data collection.
Integrating data and maps
NGOs are limited by difficulties in assimilating layers of map data in usable formats to provide a holistic view of the watershed.
Solution: Create spatial data layers and remove hurdles of accessing them.
Disconnect between data and decision making
Although NGOs collect a lot of data, it is unclear how data informs decisions.
Solution: Build capacity to help NGOs use data and digital tools for specific purposes.
Duplication in data collection
NGOs duplicate a lot of work in collecting water data and creating map layers.
Solution: co-create shared assets and protocols of all types of data.
There are already great organisations addressing points 1 and 3, such as Tech4Good. But the problems listed under 2 and 4 require many different stakeholders to come together to make sure that their work, knowledge and data can contribute to future interventions both within and outside their ecosystem. This coming together of data from multiple different sources is what will unlock the full potential of all this accumulated knowledge.
Our fundamental belief that knowledge should exist in the open where all of us can build upon each other prompted us to look towards a commons approach. So, we opted to focus on points 2 and 4 — i.e co-create shared assets and protocols for all types of knowledge and data in a manner that is accessible to CSOs, and thus helps them get a much better understanding of the watershed.
CSEI carried out journey mapping exercises to understand problems on the ground. We recorded different interventions and related challenges in this journey map.
To further clarify our understanding on the big ‘pain points’ related to data collection and access to information, CSEI started working with Rainmatter Foundation to document the perspective of farmers and CSOs in four different states — Karnataka, Maharashtra, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
During the course of this work, we realised that data problems related to water management go far beyond just mapping aquifers and calculating the water balance. In fact data and knowledge sharing problems seemed to be a big roadblock cutting across sectors of agriculture, water, landscape restoration etc. This went beyond just water — it was intertwined with the environment, ecology, and livelihoods. Challenges in terms of market linkages and the larger ecological context are key to our understanding of the problem and hence our ability to chart a viable way forward.
Our main conclusion was that CSOs need to reduce the time and resources they put into problem diagnosis. They spend so much of their budget replicating basic maps and resources that ought to be freely available. Creation of a knowledge commons will allow CSOs to share data and knowledge, enabling cross-learning between projects. It would also allow CSOs to explore challenges in the geographical regions they work in by giving them access to key data layers like aquifer maps, hydrogeology of regions and socio-economic profiles.
Building a larger knowledge sharing ecosystem would help achieve the following:
- Create shared playbooks and content for CSOs to build upon each other’s effort.
- Promote informed diagnosis and impact tracking.
- Enable deeper, local and context-specific understanding of ecological problems. This way, focus would shift to context-driven scaling of different interventions instead of replicability across geographies.
- Build a better feedback loop between research and on-ground practice
- Reduce the repetition of experiments and knowledge creation.
- Provide tools for other stakeholders (donors, consultants etc.) to build a common understanding of the problem space
But this is just the beginning. A core tenet of this platform is that it would be led and co-created by many different stakeholders to make sure that problem discovery is not a centralised process.
Which is why we are actively reaching out to partners and collaborators to understand their needs. Each one has a different use case and potential problem they would either like to help others solve, need help solving themselves, or a combination of both. Agricultural interventions, restoration of native species, watershed management, access to shareable and up-to-date data layers are some of the important areas of concern that have emerged so far in our conversations with relevant stakeholders.
We’re looking out for partners and other interested stakeholders to join us on this open knowledge movement.
Write to us at knowledgecommons@rainmatter.org to know more.
Edited by Kaavya Kumar
