Governance Principles

“Those groups who can affect or are affected by the achievements of an organization’s purpose should be given the opportunity to comment and input into the development of decisions that affect them”¹

Stakeholder Engagement: A Road Map to Meaningful Engagement – Cranfield School of Management

A key element of the strategy is the need for the EOSC to be stakeholder driven. It should be “a multi-level and multi-stakeholder governance that ensures a representation for the main stakeholder categories and disciplines, integrating both the national and European levels of authority.” (OSPP Recommendations – Section 3.3). It is therefore important for all stakeholders and all stakeholder roles to be able to participate in the governance.

Moreover, to be “open to all players, public and private, European and non-European” (HLEG Recommendations – Section 3.2), and following the analogies between the development of EOSC and the development of the Internet suggested in the HLEG report, it is also a requirement that:

“No one person, organisation, or company governs the digital space … Solutions to issues in each layer include policies, best practices, standards, specifications, and tools developed by the collaboration of stakeholders and experts from actors in business, governments, academia, technical, and civil society.”²

This is encapsulated in discussing the EOSC as a “Commons” – a management theory for natural resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit, which through the work of Fuster Morell amongst others have been extended to Digital and Knowledge Commons³:

“[The digital commons are defined as] information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favour use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources.”⁴

This has led to various proposals to apply the commons principles⁵ to research e-infrastructures and open science. The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group proposed an e-Infrastructure Commons in a 2013 white paper⁶, which proposes the need for:

“Community building, high-level strategy and coordination in Europe: for each type of e-Infrastructure service, a single coordinating organisation with a central role for user communities. These bodies, in turn, will need a forum for coordination between them across the different e-Infrastructure types.”

This would require strong stakeholder engagement to strengthen governance on the following levels:

• On the strategic level user communities should organise themselves to drive the long-term strategy.

• On the service provision level user communities will have to learn to use their joint purchasing power, in a competitive market, which includes both public and commercial offerings.

• On the innovation level, advanced users of international e-Infrastructures should participate in the specification and real-life testing of new e-Infrastructure developments.

• On the standardisation level user communities should contribute to the process of setting and implementing the international standards necessary to achieve the international, service-oriented, interoperable e-Infrastructure portfolio envisioned for the e-Infrastructure Commons 2020.

EGI and other e-infrastructures expanded upon the e-IRG e-Infrastructure Commons recommendations, extending them to Open Science in general, in a set of white papers and proposals on an Open Science Commons⁷. These papers and proposals map key principles of Commons management to Open Science⁸ as illustrate in Table 2, below.

Table 2 - Principles of Open Science Commons⁹

Both these initiatives can be considered prototypes of the EOSC vision and ambition. The key governance principles, particularly those concerning the involvement of all stakeholders as peers in the decision-making process, are still extremely pertinent. Key principles of Commons which underpin these white papers and which should be observed by any EOSC Governance model can be summarised from Eleanor Ostrom’s book “Governing the Commons”¹⁰:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.

2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.

3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.

4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.

5. A system for monitoring member’s behaviour exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.

6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.

7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.

8. Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.