United Commons is a collaborative effort to document public participation and novel innovation around the world. Community posts include cases, methods, tool/techniques, organizations, and teaching and learning resources. The GCRI platform is published under a Creative Commons License and is open to anyone. For a more general advice for submissions, please see editorial guidelines.

The United Commons is best understood as an interface between research institutions, learned societies, innovators, publishers and of course scholars and the general public. This digital infrastructure and the resulting common resources provided by the United Commons will be built on four complementary pillars: Open Publishing, Distributed Networking, Research Nesting and Impact Investing.  Open Publishing The main pillar of the United Commons is to provide quality access to relevant sources. This implies the digitization and open digital publication of relevant materials (including archives, personal libraries as well as correspondences) and publication of both rare and well-known texts through partner publishers. Distributed Networking The United Commons will offer a virtual networking environment that will allow members to comment, annotate and edit documents, to create and manage courses, services, jobs, indexes, glossaries or bibliographies, to interactively visualise underlying data and to review and incrementally improve the quality of posts and their metadata. Research Nesting The United Commons aims to function as a shared infrastructure directly at the service and under the supervision of its distributed community. It will foster active envolvement from members by hosting research projects and aggregating their outputs, supporting societies and institutes, and cooperating with researchers, developers, established publishers and journals. Building on its academic excellence, the United Commons will also engage a broad audience through targeted measures of public science communication (video and audio contents, mobile applications, digital courses, webinars, digital exhibits), the provision of publications and the dissemination of its contents through open platforms. Impact Investing From pre-seed to growth-stage, the United Commons connects the dots for impact investing in products and services that benefit the world’s three billion financially underserved. The United Commons focuses on five questions: How can the international financial system produce sufficient funding for development? How should it be allocated to help countries meet the SDGs and confront global challenges, such as climate change and pandemics? How can financing most effectively mobilize private capital, safeguard public monies, and keep debt levels sustainable? How can domestic resources be mobilized within developing countries? And how should existing institutions be changed to best cooperate?

The United Commons is focused on collaborative documentation rather than persuasion or opinion. All contributions should be drawn from credible sources such as academic papers or official evaluations. All content must be cited. The United Commons is authored collaboratively. Classroom assignments or analytical essays must be revised accordingly. Do not use the first-person. Either remove your own arguments or re-write them in the third-person and attribute them to yourself using the citation format for unpublished essays. Upload the original essay as a PDF to the entry.  Our reputation as a reliable source of information requires that we be transparent in our documentation, enabling and encouraging readers to fact-check original sources.