Heather Morrison, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, 2019/04/25
Good post applying the principles outlined by Elonto Ostrom in Governing the Commons to the management of a knowledge commons. Now a knowledge commons, Heather Morrison takes pains to make clear, is not the same as open access. It is a common pool resource (CPR), that is, "a resource that is collaboratively managed by a group of people who benefit from the resource who develop, monitor and enforce rules for collective management of the resource." From such a definition it is not surprising to see that a set of types of rules is required for an effective CPR. It seems to me that part f the distinction between a CPR and, say, open access as imagined by (say) libertarians, is that in the latter there is no management (see, eg., Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace). I think it is preferable but impossible to have an unmanaged commons - preferable, because management creates power which creates inequity, but impossible, because there is (so far) no purely technical system that will not be subverted by bad actors.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post] [Share]