Tragedy of the Commons

The Economist on the Commons

sdohrn — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:56:37 -0700

This week's Economics Focus on The Economist is entitled Commons Sense and talks about the study of the commons and the IASC conference.

Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom are quoted, and the article comes to the conclusion that the study of the "traditional" commons might teach us something about how to handle new commons including many global commons such as the atmosphere or the world's oceans:

The economics of the new commons is still in its infancy. It is too soon to be confident about its hypotheses. But it may yet prove a useful way of thinking about problems, such as managing the internet, intellectual property or international pollution, on which policymakers need all the help they can get.

There is already a small discussion on the Economist website and Jay Walljasper posted a short commentary on OntheCommons.org.

Add your own thoughts to the discussion on OntheCommons, on the Economist website, or here in the comments.

--- cross posted to CAPRi News

IASC CONFERENCE: Creating a political voice for 'commons'

sdohrn — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:04:59 -0700

Next week the 12th Biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) will be held at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, England. One of the events that are part of the conference will be a Policy Forum sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) on Tuesday (15 July) afternoon, which CAPRi helped organize on Creating a political voice for 'commons'. One of the questions we will be discussing is what an association like the IASC can do to support advocacy activities for the commons. I would be thrilled to convey any comments and suggestions you might have.

Revisiting Doctorow's "Metacrap"

Robert Link — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:14:16 -0700

Cory Doctorow's acerbic essay, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia came up in conversation today, and I thought that a good excuse to revisit this short gem. Here's a pull quote which goes to the heart of the argument:

A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

What does this kind of attitude mean for folks interested in cooperation? First and foremost, what Doctorow is talking about is really a "Tragedy of the Commons" problem, in which shared ownership (in this case, shared ownership of meta-data) lends itself to decreased personal sense of responsibility to the overall system. The solution lies in community and governance. To the extant individual meta-data creators are members of a community possessed of sufficient governance as to enforce community standards (e.g., The World Wide Web Consortium then the utopia can be reached. Put differently, the community must create circumstances in which preservation of the shared resources benefits individuals more than irresponsible exploitation of same. The trick, then, is how to create such a community? How to grow it to include all sentient beings?

Chilled by Respect?

Robert Link — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:14:02 -0700

I find it has been almost half a year since I posted anything here. Why should that be? Because I am intimidated by the level of academic rigor in the research summaries and don't want to bring down the wonderful signal:noise. So I produce no noise for fear I have no signal. Yet cooperation must surely include that amount of amount of light banter which is an important part of community building, which in turn, must be of value to cooperation and studies thereof. It brings to mind questions of the validity of the signal/noise distinction in the first place. Perhaps cooperation requires something more nuanced than these two reductive categories.