Commons Services Overview | The Governance Commons

The Governance Commons

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Commons Services

The Governance Commons supports efforts to improve governance by providing free services in three broad areas:

The Commons Knowledge Base The Commons has assembled and continues to expand an extensive knowledge base of quality, governance-related information. The knowledge base includes materials from organizations engaged in governance work, selections from the academic literature, journalistic accounts of governance problems and possible solutions, as well as multimedia materials.
	Challenge-Oriented Structure --- The Commons knowledge base is focused on finding solutions to the big governance problems — security, human rights, government legitimacy and effectiveness — problems that have, in many cases, plagued human society since antiquity. Our focus is not on information for the sake of information, but rather finding solutions to real-world problems.
	Knowledge Base Contents -- The knowledge base currently features links to more than 6,000 resources that we have identified as being especially useful, along with easy access to more extensive information sources. The Commons also includes thousands of pages of additional governance-related content and over 100 hours of online audio from Beyond Intractability — the organization that designed and constructed the Commons.
	Searching the Knowledge Base --- The Knowledge Base offers a variety of powerful search systems (capable of advanced searching of every word on every page), each tailored to a specific type of information (cited references, news, organizations, etc.).
	Browsing the Knowledge Base --- Virtual bookshelves allow you to browse the knowledge base for information on over 750 governance-related topics.

The Commons Portals The Commons offers several different portals (entry points) into the knowledge base, each highlighting the information most likely to be of interest to different types of users. These include:
	The Chronicle News and Features --- The Chronicle is designed for all users, including the civically-engaged general public, practitioners, and scholars. Frequently updated, these pages feature articles on pressing problems in each of the challenge areas, useful analyses, and interesting and innovative responses that have lessons for wider contexts.
	Education and Training --- This portal provides access to foundational learning materials on each challenge for use both by students and teachers.
	Practice --- The Practitioner portal provides practical, "actionable" information for assessing ongoing governance activities in each of the nine challenge areas, and for learning about new approaches when current options are not working as well as hoped.
	Research and Development --- The R&D portal provides an overview of current research in each challenge area, and a list of topics that are currently in need of more research and development. It also provides information about individuals and institutions that are doing particularly innovative and important work.

The Commons Learning Community The Commons provides a variety of tools designed to increase the effectiveness of the global community engaged in efforts to improve governance.
	Commons Network --- The goal of the Commons is to facilitate mutually supportive connections between people and organizations working on improving governance.
	Commons Announcements --- To speed the flow of information regarding governance issues, the Commons offers opportunities for participants to post announcements (of events, publications, RFPs, etc.) of likely interest to the Commons community.
	Commons Discussions --- The Commons offers online discussions of the tough questions associated with each challenge.
	Commons Publication --- The Commons offers a variety of publication opportunities designed to fill in gaps in the existing literature and to provide meaningful opportunities for graduate students' and practitioners' work to be better and more quickly incorporated into the field's larger knowledge base.