Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies. University Distinguished Professor of English. Director, Knowledge Commons. Seeker of open infrastructure, open governance, and open scholarship. All opinions my own and not those of my employer, especially the sweary ones.

:kc:: https://hcommons.org/members/kfitz
:11ty:: https://kfitz.info
:orcid:: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5251-0307

Last Notes

2026-01-28 14:38:06 UTC

There are many research hosting services out there. Lots of them want to host your work in order to mine it for profit. Knowledge Commons wants to build a coalition of researchers, teachers, students, and more, in order to resist the authoritarian effort to undermine public access to knowledge. Please join us by visiting https://hcommons.org, creating an account, and sharing your work with the world. And if you like what you find and want to support our efforts, become a KC Champion! We are committed to our community and its work, and we hope you’ll share that commitment. https://about.hcommons.org/kc-champions

2026-01-07 16:02:57 UTC

Just FYI: this is part of the damage being done by extractive AI companies. Their scraper bots routinely DDOS us, and they multiply to take up as much bandwidth as is available. We are having to put a huge percentage of our developers’ time into just keeping the site alive rather than building its future. They are actively destroying everything worthwhile about the internet. @npub1tms…w47k https://hcommons.social/@hello/115854618561953712

2025-05-13 14:14:33 UTC

This is powerful, and powerfully depressing. Alondra Nelson has been such an important force for open science and knowledge creation and sharing. I am only glad that she has the prominence to be this public: https://time.com/7285045/resigning-national-science-foundation-library-congress/

2025-03-15 12:49:45 UTC

This, by the by, is an effing disaster if it holds up. The number of public libraries that will go under if IMLS is shuttered is mind-boggling. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/continuing-the-reduction-of-the-federal-bureaucracy/

2025-01-28 01:28:49 UTC

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It felt that way! Part of why we ended up getting rude. I’m not sure whether I’d be more upset if they were or weren’t with the org.

2025-01-28 00:45:55 UTC

Just had a young person come door to door, signing folks up for the state branch of a national organization that I support. They wanted to sign me up, and resisted when I asked for a URL so I could do so myself. They said they’d start the process and then send a link to my phone to finish. Okay, don’t love it, but okay. They asked for my name, and then my date of birth. And no. Just no. I am not giving that to anyone coming door to door, no matter how sympathetic their cause. They did not want to take no for an answer, and we finally had to get rude to make them stop. Orgs, I beg you: don’t train your organizers this way. Your cause matters, but my privacy matters too.

2024-12-18 16:35:40 UTC

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I cannot tell you — except I already have — what that bit of grace meant to me. 🩷

2024-11-09 01:32:11 UTC

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This is amazing, Erin. Let me know how hcommons.social can help. <3

2024-10-22 23:55:40 UTC

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It was an amazing talk, and so generous of you to make it more available.

2024-10-09 13:34:10 UTC

A thought experiment: if you suddenly had access to the resources required and had a burning desire to create a community-owned and -governed cloud computing/hosting service/alternative to AWS, what would you be sure to consider, include, provide, support?

2024-09-13 15:44:03 UTC

Ooooh, congrats to my friends and colleagues at @npub1sh5…0lqh on the launch of their VERY spiffy new web design! https://ach.org

2024-07-20 17:16:07 UTC

Time for a new #introduction post, as much of my last one has changed! I’m Interim Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. I’m founder and Director Emerita* of #MeshResearch, a lab building open-source interoperable tools for new forms of scholarly communication. I'm also director of Knowledge Commons, a scholarly network serving knowledge creators from across the disciplines and around the world. https://hcommons.org
My research interests circulate around transforming #universities into more #open, more #generous spaces for cultural and intellectual work. My newest book, LEADING GENEROUSLY: TOOLS FOR TRANSFORMATION, coming out in October 2024 from Hopkins Press, explores the notion that #collective leadership infrastructures might be one key to that transformation. https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12787/leading-generously
*Not a real title.