Data Custodians

Internet Archive, Center for Human Technology, Electronic Frontiers Foundation

Custodians maintain, repair, and nurture what we have, guard the sacred, and nurture the needs of the whole.

Example activities: Teaching, healing, repairing, tending to needs, policing and security, community service, hosting events

Data Parsers

Earthcodes Data Commons

Parsers curate, review what exists, and decide if and how it meets needs – what to keep, what to dispose of, what to change or bring back to ‘life.’ Parsers tackle one of the core hard problems of AI – coding, sorting, and tagging the data so that it can be used.

Example activities: Auditing, quality assurance, editing and publishing, curating, criticism, reviews, meta-analysis

Data Philosophers

Buckminster Fuller Institute, International Bateson Institute, Studio D

Philosophers scout, discover, navigate, and map the realms of possibility and risk in multiple dimensions. They learn from the past to make discoveries that create portals to new futures. 

Example activities: Searching, conversing, questioning, unpacking assumptions, diving down rabbit holes, hypothesising, creating, dreaming, noting/sketching