Common Ground was founded in 1984 in Sydney, Australia, as a small educational publishing project exploring how literacy, culture, and technology shape the ways we make meaning.
The organization was established by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, whose Social Literacy Project—developed under Australia’s Multicultural Education Program—produced experimental books for schools and laid the foundations for our commitment to inclusive, socially engaged publishing.
The name expresses our core belief that knowledge is not a possession but a shared practice—a place where people meet to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and create meaning together.
From a small backyard press, Common Ground expanded into an international conference organizer and publisher. The first Common Ground Conference, held in 1989 at the University of Technology Sydney, brought educators and researchers together around shared questions of literacy and social change.
In 2016, under the leadership of Phillip Kalantzis-Cope and Tamsyn Gilbert, Common Ground became Common Ground Research Networks—a not-for-profit organization that renewed our social mission and modernized our structure for a new generation of scholars.
Our guiding principle remains the same: knowledge as a shared act of imagination. Across four decades, we have continued to explore how humans communicate, learn, and create meaning together—building infrastructures for collaboration in both physical and digital spaces.
From early experiments in independent publishing to today’s human-centered digital environments, our mission has remained constant: to create spaces where ideas meet, where differences connect, and where knowledge serves the common good.
We bring together the roles of publisher, conference organizer, and digital platform developer within a single ecosystem—creating horizontal knowledge communities that connect scholars, practitioners, and creators across disciplines and borders.
We are a not-for-profit corporation registered in the State of Illinois, USA. Our work is sustained by membership and guided by scholars who ensure that integrity, inclusivity, and rigor define all our activities.
We stand on three enduring principles: Openness and Accessibility – Knowledge should circulate freely; Dialogue and Diversity – Strong ideas grow through exchange; Integrity and Sustainability – Scholarship must be ethical, rigorous, and enduring.
Our headquarters in the University of Illinois Research Park anchor these values in a setting where academic inquiry meets technological innovation, connecting a global network of editors, designers, developers, and research partners.