Name: Beyond the Book: Hacking OER Infrastructures for Shared Maintenance and Governance
Start: 2026-10-09T15:35:00-0400
End: 2026-10-09T16:05:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables, special activities, and workshops.

Beyond the Book: Hacking OER Infrastructures for Shared Maintenance and Governance

Friday October 9, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT

6 DR4

ID: 33899

Open educational resources are typically imagined as books: finite objects authored at a moment in time, released, and then adopted by others. This framing has shaped nearly every layer of the OER ecosystem, from funding programs and hosting platforms to the expectations adopting instructors bring to the materials they use. It also quietly places the weight of keeping a resource current on the shoulders of individual authors, a burden that becomes untenable in fields where the subject matter shifts from semester to semester along with inevitable demands for maintenance (Jhangiani, 2019). Drawing on our recent article in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (Daly, Ahmad, & Schneider, 2026), this presentation argues for a different starting point: OER as a dynamic digital commons, more akin to an open source software project than a printed textbook, requiring ongoing maintenance and shared governance.We ground this argument in an autoethnographic case study of an OER textbook on social media, a topic in which knowledge and topics ceaselessly evolve (Daly, 2023). The original author created and maintained four overlapping editions over several years, navigating cloned versions, manual re-checks of openly licensed media, accessibility re-layering, a legal threat from an image-rights service, and warnings from a promotion committee that the labor was endangering professional advancement. When an adopting instructor proposed moving the textbook toward collective stewardship, the team pursued funding, drafted preliminary by-laws, and invited adopters into co-authorship. However, other adopting instructors either did not respond or graciously declined, defaulting to the reader role that book conventions had trained them to expect. Funders would also not pay the original author to keep improving the work, and the hosting platform offered no up-stream contribution or version-control affordances. The book in question is now archived, despite maintaining high numbers of readers or adopters.We read these obstacles against lessons from open source communities, where forking is a last resort and upstream contribution, version control, codes of conduct, and templated governance documents are common practice (Schneider, 2021). From that comparison we offer three directions for hacking the open ecosystem toward the public good. First, organize economic flows that pay for maintenance and governance, not only initial creation and adoption. Second, advocate for upstream revision affordances inside OER platforms, including version control, contributor identification, and embedded decision-making tools. Third, coordinate the cultural work of shifting adopter expectations from passive consumption to commons participation, including governance documents inside OER themselves.Libraries have repeatedly reshaped social expectations around access to knowledge. We invite the OEGlobal community to take up a parallel shift around stewardship, so that the promise of OER as growing organisms is matched by infrastructures that can support their lifecycles.

Speakers

Nathan Schneider

Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

Nathan Schneider is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab and the MA program in Media and Public Engagement. He is the author of four books, most recently Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for... Read More →

Diana Daly

Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, College of Information Science, University of Arizona

Dr. Diana Daly has authored open educational resources including Humans R Social Media and Decoding Deception, and a scholar in information science focused on literacies in new media technologies including artificial intelligence, and on information trust, misinformation, and information... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 3:35pm - 4:05pm EDT
6 DR4 MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Online
Track Hacking the Open Ecosystem and Praxis for the Public Good

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OEGlobal 2026

Nathan Schneider

Diana Daly

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OEGlobal 2026

Nathan Schneider

Diana Daly

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