While individual actions are important, collective actions can have an impact at a greater scale. A third category of actions for the community to consider focus on leveraging a strength in numbers approach, and targeting “big picture” actions institutions to regain and maintain control of their data infrastructure. This category includes a broad range of possible structural solutions to foster an open, competitive landscape for data and data analytics that is aligned with the interests of academic institutions and the communities they serve. Open competition and transparency in this crucial space is essential if the academic community wants to ensure better terms and conditions from commercial vendors, more innovation from different sources, and more truly international/global solutions. By working at scale, these actions have the potential to have significant and long-term impacts, and they are intended to be pursued alongside the important campus-level actions that we recommend in the two previous sections.
Collectively Implement Strategic Practices
The most immediate step that the academic community can take is to strategically leverage its collective market power to change the behavior of commercial vendors. By working collectively in this area, it is possible to create a market where companies must not only compete on price and quality of services they provide, but also on how well they align with community values. Collective actions may happen through existing consortia or networks, state-level coordinating bodies, or new structures.
Common Contract Terms and Conditions
An important first step to consider is to have a critical mass of institutions to demand contract terms and conditions that support a more open and competitive market. In the Risk Mitigation section, we laid out multiple recommendations for institutions to adopt strong privacy policies, data policies, and engage in open procurement practices. All of these steps are important for institutions to take on their own, but the results will be even more powerful if institutions engage in these efforts together.
Broad adoption of common terms and conditions will have a market effect that favors products and services that are in the best interests of the academic community. This includes advantaging Open Source software over “black-box” algorithms and leveling the playing field for community-owned tools to compete with commercial options whenever available.
Buying Time
There are areas of infrastructure where the community can reassert or maintain control before it is lost. This is particularly true in some areas of teaching and student life, where digital tools and analytics have not yet been comprehensively deployed. However, it will take time for viable community-controlled infrastructure to come to market, and therefore an interim strategy may be to buy time. Strategies for buying time include avoiding new services with significant potential for vendor lock-in, putting a hold on new data or data analytics products until some of the actions we outline under Risk Mitigation and Strategic Choices are complete, and reconsidering steps that could accelerate vendor capture of new grey data – particularly “smart” devices and “inclusive access” digital textbook subscription programs.