Collaborate, learn, Advocate

A Multi-Service Anthropology Platform

Empowering anthropologists, cultural advocates, and field-adjacent researchers by re-imagining the landscape of anthropological discourse. The Collaborative Anthropology Network (CollabAnthNetwork) fosters collaboration, promotes diversity within the field, and facilitates proactive cultural advocacy. Here, traditional boundaries dissolve as we merge the power of social networking with cutting-edge tools to support research, learning, and professional growth.

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“With the future orientation and the immediacy of digital production of cultural information, we can begin to reconsider the relationship between cultural knowledge and social action – not just a system for documenting and preserving, but an epistemology forever in motion, a repertoire.”

– Wendy F. HsuIn The Routledge Handbook of Digital Ethnography

Social groups, re-imagined

Gathering Places Around Subfields, Research Topics, and Applied Practices

Create and join social groups tailored to your specific interests—whether it’s a research area, cultural practice, or methodological approach. Our groups feature activity feeds, wiki-based introductions, discussion boards, and integrated Zoom meetings, making collaboration seamless and enriching.

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Your work, enhanced and distributed

Socially-Integrated Anthropology Blogs

Launch your anthropology blog directly from your social profile. Our platform distributes your content across your network, ensuring your insights reach your intended audience with ease. Whether you’re a seasoned academic or an emerging voice, your work will reach every potential audience across an entire network of your connections, followers, related groups, and all interested visitors.

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A collage of the organizational directory UI and some of its features.

Connecting People with Organizations

Feature-Rich Organizational Directory

Our directory is your gateway to connecting with clients, volunteers, and supporters. Whether you manage an anthropology non-profit, consultancy, or academic program, create a listing to showcase your organization, keep your audience informed, and expand your reach. Designed to help your organization thrive, our feature-rich directory connects your organization with the global anthropology community.

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Comment on and highlight what interests you

Beyond social networking, CollabAnthNetwork is a powerful research tool! Annotate member blogs and other websites across the internet with the hypothes.is widget. We offer a deep integration with this tool that puts collaborative research at your fingertips.

Turn annotations into conversations

Share insights, ask critical questions, and engage in meaningful dialogue directly within the text. Whether you’re working in public or private groups, the integrated Hypothes.is tool fosters collaborative analysis and deepens the understanding of complex ideas.

Manage Your Annotations with our Dashboard

Preserve and access your critical insights without the hassle of tracking them across blogs, forums, or websites. Annotations are saved directly at the source and easily managed through a CAQDAS-inspired dashboard within your social profile, ensuring that your valuable notes are always at your fingertips.

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Dive into the World of Anthropology and share its wonders!

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F.A.Q

Frequently asked questions

Is the Collaborative Anthropology Network an Anthropology Organization?

The CollabAnthNetwork is not an anthropology organization, it is a technology platform designed to support the anthropology community, including individual anthropologists and anthropology organizations. Organizations can utilize the diverse service offerings of the Collaborative Anthropology Network to extend their reach, connect with the broader community, and focus on creating and distributing valuable anthropology resources and programs to their members.

The CollabAnthNetwork provides a unique opportunity for anthropology organizations to reduce their technology requirements and overhead costs, significantly increase their outreach, and enhance the services they offer to members. If you represent an anthropology organization, we invite you to contact us about group plans tailored to your needs.

Does It Cost Money To Join?

No, joining the CollabAnthNetwork is completely free! The core social network is largely open to the public as well, but you will need to register to access certain features, such as the members directory and individual social profiles (we are considering offering limited public profiles in the future).

While the essential social networking features are free, we do offer additional paid services for those who wish to enhance their experience. These services include creating a personal blog within the community, listing an organization in the directory, posting a job or resume on the upcoming job board, and participating in or offering online courses in our upcoming open course marketplace (founding instructor partners are currently being sought). However we ensured that there are free options for all of these services as well. Premium plans provide additional benefits and help to support the ongoing maintenance and development of the platform.

We Use Slack For Our Community Platform. Why Do We Need This?

Slack has become a popular tool for organizational and professional communication, thanks to its ease of use and freemium model that allows users to create a ‘workspace’ at no cost. For teams that need real-time communication, Slack’s features can be incredibly useful. However, when it comes to fostering an open community platform, Slack falls short in several critical areas:

Short-Term Memory: Slack’s basic plan, which is often the go-to option for many groups, functions primarily as a group messaging service with a limited 90-day window for viewing messages. This design is fine for small teams that require daily communication and can operate within this limited timeframe. However, for organizers trying to build a community forum, this short-term memory poses a significant challenge. Important conversations, shared resources, and collective knowledge disappear after 90 days unless users are willing to pay for a premium plan—a cost that can quickly add up as the community grows.
Lack of Community-Centric Features: Slack is fundamentally designed for ongoing team collaboration, not for building and sustaining a community forum. While Slack offers channels for basic organization, features like long-term archiving, advanced community management tools, and robust options for categorizing and retrieving discussions are limited. This makes it difficult for community members to revisit past discussions, find relevant information, or contribute to a knowledge base that endures over time.
Limited Customization and Scalability: As a proprietary platform, Slack offers limited customization options. Communities are confined to the tools and features that Slack provides, which may not fully align with the specific needs of an anthropology-focused community. Furthermore, as your community grows, the need for more robust features and the associated costs can become a barrier to scalability.

The Collaborative Anthropology Network Advantage: In contrast, the Collaborative Anthropology Network is designed from the ground up to support the unique needs of the anthropology community. Here’s why it stands out:

Long-Term Community Engagement: Unlike Slack, the Collaborative Anthropology Network allows for permanent archiving of discussions, resources, and shared knowledge. This means that valuable conversations and content aren’t lost after a set period, enabling the community to build a rich, enduring knowledge base over time.
Tailored Features for Anthropology: The platform offers a range of tools specifically designed to foster collaboration, research, and learning within the anthropology community. From group discussion boards to integrated wikis, and from research tools to an annotation dashboard, the CollabAnthNetwork provides a suite of features that go far beyond what Slack can offer.
Free and Accessible: The Collaborative Anthropology Network is a free platform with no hidden costs or paywalls for basic functionality. This ensures that all community members can fully participate without the need for expensive upgrades or premium plans.
Scalable and Customizable: Built on a customizable open-source foundation, the platform can grow with your community. Whether you’re a small group or a large organization, the CollabAnthNetwork can scale to meet your needs, with the flexibility to adapt as those needs evolve.
Focus on the Anthropology Community: While Slack is a general-purpose tool, the Collaborative Anthropology Network is specifically dedicated to supporting anthropologists, cultural advocates, and related researchers. This focus ensures that the platform’s features, content, and community are all aligned with the interests and goals of its users.

In conclusion, while Slack may serve the basic communication needs of small teams, it lacks the depth and breadth required to support a thriving, open community platform. The Collaborative Anthropology Network, on the other hand, is purpose-built to facilitate long-term collaboration, knowledge sharing, and professional growth within the anthropology community. By choosing CollabAnthNetwork, you’re investing in a platform that’s designed not just to connect, but to empower your community.

Why Is the CollabAnthNetwork Platform a Private Company?

While technological advancements have made sophisticated platforms possible, anthropology remains a niche field largely made up of humble non-profit organizations. Most anthropology organizations lack the resources to build and maintain the complex technology platforms that today’s digital environment demands. Organizations with some amount of resources often rely on proprietary SaaS platforms owned by large corporations to provide services beyond a basic website. While these offer out-of-the-box solutions and customer support, they come with significant costs and limited customization options. Smaller organizations turn to open-source platforms to launch basic websites, but these still require experienced designers, developers, and dedicated IT staff to remain functional, secure, and up-to-date, which is often beyond the reach of those organizations.

It’s also important to recognize that many anthropologists and anthropology organizations rely on social media platforms that have innovated business models based on surveillance capitalism, where personal data becomes the product, and engagement is driven by algorithms at the cost of user well-being.

Anthropologists and Non-profit organizations often face a difficult choice:

Make large investments in technology and hire full-time IT staff, or
Depend on for-profit platforms, subject to their development priorities (or lack thereof),
Struggle with basic, poorly configured, or outdated instances of open-source platforms managed by part-time or inexperienced staff and volunteers.
Rely on large social media platforms that collect and sell their data and don’t offer any means to advance the field of anthropology beyond their networking capabilities.

“Yeah, and you’re a ‘for-profit,’ social media platform…“
While it is fair to say that in this analysis the Collaborative Anthropology Network is more like a technology platform than a non-profit anthropology organization using one, we are a different kind of platform. Unlike the multi-billion dollar industry that exploits research outputs or social media platforms that collect and sell your personal data, the CollabAnthNetwork was created by an aspiring design anthropologist with a background in web and graphic design and a degree in anthropology in order to provide much-needed services to the anthropology community. The CollabAnthNetwork has been pitched to a number of prominent anthropology organizations and foundations, but when these partnerships didn’t take shape, the development forged ahead to become the most innovative platform dedicated to the anthropology community. This approach allows us to provide cutting-edge technology and exceptional customer support typically associated with SaaS platforms, while offering free services not seen with traditional anthropology organizations, and premium plans at a cost lower than most organizational memberships.

We fully support anthropology organizations as a vital user base of the CollabAnthNetwork and are actively developing features and group plans to help them provide additional benefits to their members. We are also open to creating community-led committees and advisory boards to assist with decision-making as the platform grows. However, we recognize that our role is in the operation, maintenance, and development of the platform and its underlying technology, with anthropology organizations, their members, and the broader anthropology community at the center of our development priorities.

As just one important example, a commitment to user rights and privacy is an ongoing technological challenge in today’s digital environment. While many non-profit organizations may struggle with these complexities, we take this challenge seriously, driving us to continually innovate and enhance our platform’s security and user protections. An endeavor that is largely outside of the scope of an anthropology organization.

There were limited available opportunities to partner with existing organizations, we were unable to locate eligible or relevant grants in anthropology or the humanities, and there was little to no assistance or benefit to be had by establishing ourselves as a non-profit. While we are a technology company – rather than a non-profit anthropology organization – the CollabAnthNetwork is distinct from other technology platforms still commonly used by anthropology organizations today. We are driven by a passion for anthropology and a commitment to listening to the community like no other platform before.

How do you cover the costs of running such a platform?

Starting with an open-source foundation has significantly reduced our development and maintenance costs. To further support the platform, we offer paid services such as personal blogs, job postings, online courses, and an organizational directory—always providing both free and paid options. We also offer sponsorship opportunities and group plans for anthropology organizations. To manage costs effectively, we limit the amount of media users can upload to their profiles, but offer premium memberships for those who need more storage. These revenue streams help us cover the costs of operating and maintaining the platform.

We are committed to providing a platform that does not rely on the invasive business models of surveillance capitalism used by major social networking platforms. The paid services on the CollabAnthNetwork are our way of offering all the social networking features at no cost, while ensuring the sustainability of the platform.