At the largest system(s) scale I think of climate change and the many messy, complex, wicked problems intersecting with it and how this demands collaboration and experimentation, and a kind of openness that pushes beyond open access to "finalized" scholarship. At a medium-large scale (organizational/institutional context) I think we need good examples, and good stories about these examples, to increase the perceived value of collaboration and experimentation in higher ed. At the personal scale, I have long been driven to collaborate with colleagues because I find it far livelier and love the loopy building of ideas together.
I don't have a clear answer to this big question, but I do think it could be interesting to experiment with governance systems like sociocracy, or with design process approaches like regenerative design, or with design principles drawn from observations of patterns in living systems specifically applied to the governance/design of the project overall. I'm compelled by the Design Logics that have been developing in parallel, and intersecting with, the design of PECE -- I wonder how these Logics could be applied to the broader governance of the project(s) overall? I wonder what happens when we oscillate the figure/ground of project/platform and governance/broader collaboration?
regen.live and genderinculture.org are the two instances Brian C and I developed for teaching at RPI. We created a group to facilitate research/writing on PECE a while back, but have ended up mostly using Google Docs for collaborative writing, and not leveraging PECE features all that much. Perhaps PECE could host the metadata tool we're developing? We could also use PECE for collaborative ethnography of RDA meetings, annotating each other's field notes.
There is so much data generated within the 6+ cities project. I think just pulling all these sites/data together is a single platform/repository is useful. There are many features and requirements baked into PECE that help demystify ethnographic data analysis: the metadata fields required when uploading artifacts, the (shared) analytics, etc. Specifically relating to the 6+ cities project, I'd like to revisit the Eco Ed Literacy Goals and see what new (ethnographically informed) goals should be added at this point, and how the 6+ cities project provides many new examples for the Goals.
I'd like to wrap up the metadata tool I'm working on with RDA/Lindsay, use PECE again in the classroom, write about PECE and pedagogy (with Brian, who I worked on instances/classes with, and others that have used it), upload interviews from years ago that I have on my laptop (with EPA scientists from the National Exposure Research Laboratory), use PECE for my new work on/with the Jefferson Project (so far have four undergraduates at RPI involved with the resaerch), and generally work on writing and publishing as a way of making sense of the ongoing PECE project and sharing insights and open questions with others interested in data sharing, collaborative ethnography, experimental scholarship, etc.
In recent years I have worked (primarily with Lindsay Poirier) on developing our practices and articulations around metadata in PECE. This work has progressed in the context of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Empirical Humanities Working Group. Most recently, we have begun work on a tool that would walk users (intended to be researchers with diverse backgrounds in the social sciences and humanities) through a process that considers their underlying goals for data sharing and then suggests follow-up questions that help navigate choices around what standards or fields to draw from in developing a metadata management plan. See: https://rd-alliance.org/groups/empirical-humanities-metadata-working-group.html
Also with Lindsay Poirier, I have worked on adapting Kim Fortun's multi-scale approach to ethnography for the context of understanding different data cultures (publication submitted to the Data Science journal).
With Brian Callahan I have developed instances of PECE (genderinculture.org and regen.live) for classes at RPI.