Join the KC Coalition
Cross-posted from the Knowledge Commons team blog.
Knowledge Commons is not just a platform — we’re a coalition. And that coalition needs you.
The tl;dr: We need to raise a significant amount of money in order to keep the project moving forward. If you, the individual human reading this, can contribute, we’d be enormously grateful. Any amount will help us reach our goal. But if you can’t, there’s still a lot you can do!
- Email your university librarian, the director of your teaching and learning center, and the leadership of your IT unit to tell them how Knowledge Commons supports your work and encourage them to support us in return.
- Reach out to the leaders of your professional organization to encourage them to join and support Knowledge Commons.
- Post about our campaign on social media and encourage others to contribute.
- Raise awareness of the platform by linking to your KCWorks deposits, your group discussions, and your Commons websites, letting your colleagues know that they can join us as well.
Now, the reasons we hope you and your institutions will join us:
Our coalition brings together individuals and institutions who want to preserve and protect the knowledge they create and the communities that rely on it at a moment when both are under threat. Those threats include corporate enclosure and governmental overreach, each of which works to restrict access to the knowledge necessary to a free and functioning society.
Knowledge Commons is a non-profit, academic-run project that provides both the space and the tools for building solidarity among knowledge creators. Knowledge Commons also works to support the institutions and organizations whose missions include research, teaching, and community-building. We provide that space and those tools free of charge to all users, because we believe that knowledge should be a public good, and that all should be able to participate in developing it and learning from it.
But we cannot do that work without support. Today, the Commons is facing threats of its own, from federal grant terminations, from ravenous and destructive corporate information scrapers, from shrinking academic budgets, and more.
We are a tiny team, with one half-time and four full-time employees, plus a few members of the MSU faculty and staff who donate a small percentage of their time to the project. We operate on a very lean budget; in fiscal year 2025, our expenditures totaled less than $750,000. Just over two-thirds of those expenditures were covered through grants, both public and private. Fiscal year 2026 is thus far shaping up very similarly.
That leaves us, however, with $250,000 that we need to raise to keep the project moving forward. And that’s where you come in: we need your help building the Knowledge Commons coalition.
We’re seeking new institutional and organizational members who want to be part of building a model for collective support for shared infrastructure. We offer three tiers of membership — supporting, sustaining, and participating — with suggested contributions determined by organization type and size.
With your contribution, your organization or institution becomes something far more important than a customer; you become a member of our coalition, an investor in our future success. And you get a range of benefits, of course, including the ability to create private collections in KCWorks, access to members-only town halls and webinars, and a voice in Commons governance. (We’ll even throw in a tote bag!)
We are committed to remaining open and free in perpetuity, and we are committed to building and supporting the communities that use our tools. With your help, we will continue our work toward a transformation in global knowledge ecosystems.
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