• a [[place]].
  • #pull [[elinor ostrom]]
  • alternatively, a [[device]].
    • The [[Agora of Flancia]] is a [[knowledge commons]].
    • #go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons pull
    • In all matters pertaining the Commons I consider [[doubleloop]] ~ [[@neil]] the steward of this Agora.
    • The following picks from his notes below:
    • "beyond [[market]] and [[state]]"
    • I sometimes think of them as [[embedding]] and thus potentially [[regulating]] markets.
    • recommended [[free, fair and alive]], it's great. from his notes below:
    • [[commons]] are [[social organisms]], [[social systems]], [[social forms]]
    • a [[commons]] is not only about [[sharing]] but about creating [[systems]] that produce [[shareable things]]
    • they enable [[self organized problem solving]]
    • through social processes that build on the sharing of knowledge and physical resources
    • they are [[spaces]] that are born out of the impulse to [[help others]]
    • they bring together solutions to social, political and economic challenges into an integrated whole
    • [[pull]] [[commoning]] [[ontology]]
    • [[vera]] (from wiki below)
      • "The commons is the cultural and natural [[resources]] [[accessible to all]] members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, [[not owned privately]]."
      • [[pragmatix]]
      • [[garrett hardin]]
      • [[1968]] [[the tragedy of the commons]]
      • [[1833]] [[william forster lloyd]] herders overusing land
      • [[tragedy of the fishers]]
      • [[frank van laerhoven]] and [[elinor ostrom]]: Hardin essentially invented the term commons
      • of course Ostrom's work shows there are ways to avert this tragedy all around us
      • in Britain, land [[enclosure]] worked over centuries to erode the commons
      • [[peter barnes]] [[sky trust]]
      • [[notable theoreists]] list is a banger
      • [[contemporary commons movements]] too
    • [[there is no commons without commoning]]
    • [[international journal of the commons]]
    • #pull [[frontiers of commoning]]
• a [[list]].
  • add items by #pushing here or write in the default [[stoa]] in this Agora node.
  • [[an agora]].

Commons

[[I like commons]].

In a nutshell: 'a commons' is a shared thing between a bunch of people that they actively maintain together.

The idea is that they are "beyond market and state".

Commons can be found in all kinds of walks of life - the environment (grazing lands, fisheries, community forests), culture, digital realm, knowledge commons.

There's a lot to unpack. My favourite book on commons and commoning is [[Free, Fair and Alive]].

The logic of the commons is the logic of a common humanity that has realized that all humans should be equal participants and beneficiaries in society (see Dyer-Witheford 1999, 2007, 2009; Fuchs 2011b; Hardt and Negri 2009; Žižek 2010).

– [[Social Media: A Critical Introduction]]

What is a commons?

Also what's the difference between 'the Commons' and 'a commons'?

The Commons is a means of provisioning and governance that generally doesn't need the permission of legislatures or courts to move forward.

– [[David Bollier]], [[Stir to Action]] Issue 30

The commons are cared for by the those that directly inhabit and gain from its wealth.

– [[Seeding the Wild]]

Despite vivid differences among commons focused on natural resources, digital systems, and social mutuality, they all share structural and social similarities.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

So instead of conceiving of commons as closed systems of common property managed by a “club,” it is more productive to see them as social organisms who, thanks to their [[semi-permeable membrane]]s, can interact with larger forces of life — communities, ecosystems, other commons.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

The commons is not simply about “sharing,” as it happens in countless areas of life. It is about sharing and bringing into being durable social systems for producing shareable things and activities.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

Commons are living social systems through which people address their shared problems in self-organized ways.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

The commons is a robust class of self-organized social practices for meeting needs in fair, inclusive ways.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

Each commons depends on social processes, the sharing of knowledge, and physical resources. Each shares challenges in bringing together the social, the political (governance), and the economic (provisioning) into an integrated whole.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

The elemental human impulse that we are born with — to help others, to improve existing practices — ripens into a stable social form with countless variations: a commons.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

How big is a commons?

In a commons, the resource can be small and serve a tiny group (the family refrigerator), it can be community-level (sidewalks, playgrounds, libraries, and so on), or it can extend to international and global levels (deep seas, the atmosphere, the Internet, and scientific knowledge).

– [[Understanding Knowledge as a Commons]]

The commons can be well bounded (a community park or library); transboundary (the Danube River, migrating wildlife, the Internet); or without clear boundaries (knowledge, the ozone layer).

– [[Understanding Knowledge as a Commons]]

Why?

the commons is not just about small-scale projects for improving everyday life. It is a germinal vision for reimagining our future together and reinventing social organization, economics, infrastructure, politics, and state power itself.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

The commons is a social form that enables people to enjoy freedom without repressing others, enact fairness without bureaucratic control, foster togetherness without compulsion, and assert sovereignty without nationalism.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

A commons … gives community life a clear focus. It depends on democracy in its truest form. It destroys inequality. It provides an incentive to protect the living world. It creates, in sum, a politics of belonging.”

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

The virtue of the commons as a mode of thought and action isn’t simply that it provides for the scaled management of pooled resources, but that it spurs us to envision a way of life founded in interdependence, mutuality and shared responsibility for the outcomes experienced by others. Any situation organized in this way offers us a way to get outside of ourselves, a scaffolding for the development of intersubjectivity.

– [[Radical Technologies]]

Where market logics generally seek to collectivize risk and privatize gain, adherents to the principles of the commons believe that the greatest degree of sustainable benefit is derived from resources when they are held jointly, and managed democratically for the good of all.

– [[Radical Technologies]]

Politics of it

The world of commoning represents a profound challenge to capitalism because it is based on a very different ontology.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

Difficulties for commons

Potential problems in the use, governance, and sustainability of a commons can be caused by some characteristic human behaviors that lead to social dilemmas such as competition for use, free riding, and over- harvesting. Typical threats to knowledge commons are commodification or enclosure, pollution and degradation, and nonsustainability.

– [[Understanding Knowledge as a Commons]]

Related

• [[Elinor Ostrom]]
• [[Commons-based peer production]]
• [[a re-commonification of welfare systems]]

counter anti disintermediation

• a [[doctrine]]
  • [[against]] [[anti disintermediation]]
    • says that [[distributed systems]] and [[web 3]] are likely the best tools to counteract [[anti disintermediation]] as effected by profit-seeking centralizing entities
    • I would posit that the [[agora]] fits the doctrine: it is based on distributed concepts even if currently mostly implemented as server side; data integrate comes from repositories in user control; and is not profit seeking.
  • [[go]] http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation pull
    • [[quote]] Users of e-mail and Usenet, the two most common platforms, did not generally operate their own servers on their own local computers, but were dependent on servers run by others. But servers require upkeep. Operators need to finance hosting and administration. As the Internet grew beyond its relatively small early base, Internet service came to be provided by capitalist corporations, rather than public institutions, small businesses, or universities. Open, decentralized services came to be replaced by private, centralized platforms. The profit interests of the platform financiers drove [[anti-disintermediation]].
    • [[quote]] End-to-End principle: platforms must not depend on servers and admins, even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible, run on the computers of the platform’s users.
  • [[web 3]] is a possible answer, being a set of tools to drive a serverless internet
    • [[decentralized web]]
    • [[ipfs]]?
    • [[hypercore]]?
    • [[fission]]?
  • [[neil]] https://social.coop/web/statuses/107071940849631302

Counter-anti-disintermediation

Tactics to avoid the centralisation of things that were once decentralised.

I think Github centralising the world's source code on the back of an entirely disintermediated tool is probably a good example of anti-disintermediation. By the use of lock-in and network effects.

The assumption here is:

• Disintermediation = good
• Anti-disintermediation = bad
• Counter-anti-disintermediation = a means to get back to good

Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.

– Exploitation and Rent-Seeking Models in Social Media and P2P Exchange Platforms

Going back to an early Internet architecture of cooperative, decentralized servers, as projects such as Diaspora, GNU Social, and others are attempting to do, will not work.[5] This is precisely the sort of architecture that anti-disintermediation was designed to defeat. Decentralized systems need to be designed to be counter-anti-disintermediationist.

– Exploitation and Rent-Seeking Models in Social Media and P2P Exchange Platforms

Central to the defeat of this particular peer-to-peer movement was that its infrastructure was vulnerable to [[weaponised design]], in which the network protocol directly empowers attackers through its design. For BitTorrent, this empowerment came as the protocol exposes every user’s participation in the network. This data was exploited to unmask users, ruin lives and provide justification for new legislation.

– [[This is Fine: Optimism and Emergency in the Decentralised Network]]

What to do

[[Dmytri Kleiner]] suggests that peer-to-peer is the way to go to counter anti-disintermediation. (i.e. [[No Servers! No Admins!]])

Central to the counter-anti-disintermediationist design is the End-to-End principle: platforms must not depend on servers and admins, even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible, run on the computers of the platform’s users. […] By keeping the computational capacity in the hands of the users, we prevent the communication platform from becoming capital, and we prevent the users from being instrumentalized as an audience commodity.

– Exploitation and Rent-Seeking Models in Social Media and P2P Exchange Platforms

Twin pages

• https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediation pull

digital commons

• a [[place]].
  • #pull [[knowledge commons]] [[digital]] [[commons]]
    • the [[internet]] provides us with the ability to construct an essentially infinite number of [[digital commons]] by definition as long and as far as you allow (that is, do not encumber) [[copying]].
      • this is why I am against [[copyright]] in general.
      • whatever can be copied for free can be freely shared and is thus trivially part of the [[commons]].
• a [[list]].
  • (you can #push examples here or write them in the [[stoa]] below).
  • an [[agora]].

• [[commons]]
  • [[free libre open source software]]
  • [[tragedy of the digital commons]]
  • [[open course]] [[open course ware]]
  • [[pull]] [[governing the commons]]

Digital commons

Stuff like information, data, culture and knowledge which are maintained as a shared resource by an online community.

For example, projects in the area of:

• [[free software]]
• [[free culture]]
• [[open data]]
• [[open access]]

Wikipedia is a well known one.

What is a digital commons?

Digital commons are a subset of the commons, where the resources are data, information, culture and knowledge which are created and/or maintained online.

– [[dulongderosnay2020: Digital commons]]

The digital [[commons]] are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology.

– Digital commons (economics) - Wikipedia

Distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. That could cover a lot of stuff…

Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created.

– Digital commons (economics) - Wikipedia

^ that's true of commons in general, but seems like it wouldn't need to be quite the case for digital commons… in that they are easier to be used beyond the community that creates them.

The distinction between digital commons and other digital resources is that the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources.

– Digital commons (economics) - Wikipedia

Digital commons is a (the?) commons centred on digital media and digital devices - might include many kinds of automation, guidance of material systems, provisioning and transportation of material goods etc. bringing a major focus on the digital capability and literacy of the commoners. It's a material commons of code, devices, media, enabled and stewarded by cultural capability (aka skill)

– [[Mike Hales]] https://social.coop/@mike_hales/107430505867111451 pull

Examples of digital commons

The [[free software]] movement in general is called a digital commons (by Wikipedia at least).

Examples of the digital commons include wikis, open-source software, and open-source licensing.

– Digital commons (economics) - Wikipedia

[[Free culture]], [[public domain]], [[open data]] and [[open access]] are mentioned in [[dulongderosnay2020: Digital commons]].

This research publication from [[IPPR]] seems to focus on data as a digital commons:

It requires a broader understanding of data as a public resource, but one of an exceptional kind: that there is space for market-based approaches, and for some direct state regulation, but that data will increasingly often require the creation of new forms of ownership and control, out of the hands of either market or state institutions.

– [[Creating a digital commons]]

Commoning a digital commons

Social life of a digital commons

Stewarding a digital commons

How would you protect it from enclosure? i.e. how would you [[Actively Thwart Enclosure & Cooptation]] in a digital commons?

Typically, information created in the digital commons is designed to stay in the digital commons by using various forms of licensing, including the [[GNU General Public License]] and various [[Creative Commons]] licenses.

Provisioning a digital commons

Compared to knowledge commons

I wonder how digital commons compares to [[knowledge commons]]? Perhaps just that some knowledge commons are digital commmons, and some digital commons are knowledge commons?

Issues

It is also worth noting that a commons can get the mix of collective control and individualism wrong. A group may exert a suffocating presence on the individual, or on certain types of individuals. Patriarchy is a problem in many subsistence and digital commons despite women’s significant role in commoning.

– [[Free, Fair and Alive]]

[[Tragedy of the digital commons]]? (there's a paper on it, not read it though)

• a [[thing]].
  • [[list]]
    • [[pull]]] [[knowledge]] [[commons]]
  • [[go]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_commons pull
  • [[pull]] [[understanding knowledge as a commons]]
  • [[flancia]] is the revolution of an altruist [[knowledge commons]]
    • [[pull]] [[towards a knowledge commons]]

• [[commons]]
  • [[collective ownership]]
  • [[collective intelligence]]
  • [[intellectual property]]
  • [[information resource]]
  • [[open science]]
  • [[noosphere]]
  • [[pull]] [[governing the commons]]

knowledge commons

"the mutualization of productive knowledge"

The term "knowledge commons" refers to information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet.

– Knowledge commons - Wikipedia

Examples of knowledge commons

The knowledge commons is a model for a number of domains, including Open Educational Resources such as the MIT OpenCourseWare, free digital media such as Wikipedia,[4] Creative Commons –licensed art, open-source research,[5] and open scientific collections such as the Public Library of Science or the Science Commons, free software and Open Design.[6][7]

– Knowledge commons - Wikipedia

• [[Open Educational Resources]]
• [[Wikipedia]]
• [[Creative Commons]]
• [[Public Library of Science]]
• [[Science Commons]]
• [[Free software]]

Knowledge commoning

Once again, the promise of a knowledge commons is best made evident in the disagreements and difficulties in determining who and how it should be managed

– [[Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities]]

Knowledge commons is a misnomer bcos there is no such thing as knowledge. (!!)

What there IS/ARE is/are practices of knowing, communicating and organising.

So a 'knowledge commons' is a commons of literacy and (collective) labour power, thro which commoners are able to capably understand and organise their practical life as a commons, in a world of commons. It's a cultural commons.

– [[Mike Hales]] https://social.coop/@mike_hales/107430510590782176 pull

Resources

• [[Understanding Knowledge as a Commons]]