The second day at the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with a paper session on platform governance, and the first speaker is Brooke Ann Coco. Digital technologies increasingly mediate our lives, and digital platforms tend to centralise power – how might this be reversed to put power back into the hands of communities through Knowledge Organisation Infrastructure (KOI)? Brooke’s focus here is on the Metagov community, which is pursuing these goals.
Metagov faces a knowledge management challenge: it is working across several collaborative platforms, which fragments communication and information management. There may be a role for AI systems here: AI tools can assist in the governance of these processes, but also depend themselves on good data structures.
KOI is critical here – it is a kind of federated library system, employing a dedicated knowledge reference identifier (RID) system, and in that sense operates as a kind of air traffic controller for knowledge, connecting existing tools and platforms within an organisational knowledge ecosystem. It supports permissioning, and inter-organisational information sharing.
This also learns the lessons from previous initiatives like Govbase, which drew on more implicit protocols and eventually outgrew the technological systems it was founded on, devolving into a data swamp. Once data flows degrade in this way, this undermines the intentions of a project; part of the problem also was a lack of dedicated data stewardship, which made the data unusable in daily practice.
The KOI working group is therefore focussing on developing data commons guidelines. Brooke has examined this through ethnographic research with this community, utilising an automated tool to identify and ethically gather key cases within the online community and processes that might inform the research. This tool might also be useful for the activities of the Metagov community itself, in fact, as it could also be used to gather community feedback and requests and build a community knowledge base.
This might be understood as a kind of watershed governance: altering the terrain on which the group operates and interacts, and shaping processes through which it works more effectively. This draws on design (emphasising epistemic sovereignty), data (through better data management), and practice elements (enabling communities to develop better workflows).
