Katherine Skinner

Research Lead

Katherine Skinner is an open knowledge researcher-activist with deep commitments to community building, organizational resilience, and systems thinking. Her passion for facilitating, empowering, and cultivating communities led her to co-found and direct the Educopia Institute for more than 15 years, where she provided scaffolding, training, and systems to support such collaborative groups as Library Publishing Coalition, MetaArchive Cooperative, BitCurator Consortium, C4DISC, Software Preservation Network, and Maintainers. She also co-authored Community Cultivation: A Field Guide (2018) to provide an open, practical guide to this type of work.

She received her PhD from Emory University in 2005, and she has authored and co-authored three books and numerous reports and articles. She has served as Principal Investigator for 25 research projects funded by foundations and federal grants and awards on topics like education (Nexus LAB, Bitcurator.edu), digital curation (Chronicles in Newspaper Preservation, OSSArcFlow), and scholarly communication (Library Publishing Workflows, Mapping the Scholarly Communication Infrastructure). She lives in Greensboro, NC, in the US, on the unceded, stolen lands of a number of Indigenous peoples including the Catawba, Eno, Sappony, Shakori, Keyauwee, and Saura/Cheraw.