The circulation of data ranked high among the objectives adopted by CGIAR at its founding in 1971. This chapter considers how agricultural experts attempted to realize a desired “full exchange of information” among scientists working at geographically distant sites, in different languages and cultural contexts, with different organisms and research interests from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The chapter focuses on the historical development of “crop descriptors,” today defined as providing an “international format and a universally understood language for plant genetic resources data.” Developers of descriptors aspire to agree on traits and terms that will allow users from diverse institutions and backgrounds to contribute to and extract information from an integrated data infrastructure. The chapter examines crop descriptors as a critical component of CGIAR’s earliest efforts to create “system-wide” research tools and agendas, emphasizing the scientific and political agendas that shaped this top-down systematizing work, finding that it provided an opportunity for CGIAR to instantiate and consolidate its central position in a web of international development initiatives.

‘Community resource directory data' comprises information about the accessibility of health, human, and social services that are available to people in need. Such services are provided by a fractured landscape of governments, nonprofit organizations, contractors, and other civic institutions. Institutions that fund services don’t tend to collect information about the accessibility of those services – and service providers often lack strong incentives to promote this information themselves. Instead, directory data tends to be aggregated by ‘infomediaries,’ for use in their proprietary channels, or for sale to third parties as a commodity. The result is a knowledge anti-commons, in which resource data is simultaneously overproduced and underutilized – a tragedy that causes systemic dysfunction across the so-called safety net. This paper outlines a set of strategic interventions pursued through the Open Referral Initiative – a community of practice that has developed data exchange standards, open source tools, and pilot projects through which multiple stakeholders experiment with new methods of sharing resource information as open data. The paper’s final section outlines a set of institutional designs that can hypothetically sustain the provision of trustworthy open resource data as a public good.