This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

Six Degrees begins in the beginning. Stanley Milgram's initial small world studies are analyzed. His findings in seeing if a group of people in Nebraska can get a letter to someone in Massachusetts are scrutinized. Milgram left a puzzle. Mathematically, six degrees of separation can be shown and intuitively it is appealing. But do social networks actually work that way?

Initially, Watts steps into the world of pure mathematic theory. Graph theory and random graphs are employed to build potential worlds in which connections can be made. These tools are detailed and their histories explained.

Watts and his colleagues then take the science to new levels, by introducing sociology, epidemiology, economics, and business models into this new multi-disciplinary science. Immediately, each new field of study brings with it new insights into network dynamics.

This convergence of disciplines reveals the social, transportation and technological networks that make up our world. These networks are, ultimately, made up of individuals. Individuals in turn relate back to the networks and define how they operate.

Socially, people relate to their network by clustering. Clusters are logical organizations of network elements. In a social context, we might cluster in terms of a religion, a favorite author, a school we are attending or an affinity for a type of food. Some of these have very close physical distance, while others have a social distance with members spread out over a large area.

Networks of this type are, to various extents, “scale-free” networks. If graphed these networks roughly follow a classic power law trend where the level of connectivity between two nodes in a network increases dramatically as more nodes are connected. Real-world scale-free networks tend to have highly connected hubs which rapidly, purposely, and efficiently transmit pertinent or pervasive content from one location to another. In social circles, these are networkers. In the airline network these are hub airports. In traffic they would be freeway interchanges.

Due to this architecture, the Internet and modern air transport have combined to greatly decrease the role of proximity in our social networks. This has had great impacts on commerce, tourism, cultural sensitivity and other social factors. However, it has also led to great risks in the transmission of diseases, sensitivity to distant economic fluctuations, and rapid spread of misinformation.

These dynamics create a type of network that Duncan calls simultaneously robust and vulnerable. Their strength and weakness is that, with rapid transmission from cluster to cluster, anything can move quickly from one location or group to another. He uses the example of Toyota, whose network of suppliers was organized in such a way as to quickly compensate for and recover from a potential economic catastrophe.

Stable scale-free networks do not rely on a rigid hierarchy to provide direction in times of crisis. Rather, the structure of the network itself can rapidly respond to an unforeseen situation.

Their network was arranged in such a way as to foster and reward communication. This communication helped cope with ambiguous or unplanned situations. Rather than paralyzing Toyota while people waited for a decision from a rigid hierarchy, the contractors in the network were able to analyze the calamity and provide a rapid response to it.

As mentioned above, this robustness also rapidly transmits malicious content as well. The Melissa Virus, SARS and Ebola are analyzed to show why the network did or did not transmit them and, when it did, how they eventually died out.

Watts ends this book by summarizing that the multidimensional nature of social distance is sometimes counterintuitive and subjective. People can feel close in a network sense to people they are physically distant from and, conversely, socially distant from people physically nearby.

He continues by warning that social and physical distances have shrunk. People can quickly travel from place to place and economies are highly interdependent. The sheer number of dependencies in the modern world may yield surprising results from seemingly insignificant actions.

He finishes by showing the stability of our networks with the example of how New York adapted to the 9-11 attacks. The City bounced back to semi-normal operations within a week. During the disaster, the best laid plans of emergency operations staff were scuttled by the utter unavailability of facilities and services designed to copy with disasters. The network will provide.

Humans have taken the cooperative arrangements that benefited organisms and species at the biological level to the cognitive and social levels: the capacity to play cooperative social games that benefit all was a driver of the evolution of human intellectual capacity; increased intellectual capacity manifested in both the concrete sphere of tool-making and the abstract sphere of social relationships. Once enhanced cognitive capabilities made complex social arrangements like status, reputation, gossip, persuasion, punishment, alliance possible, human social capacities became a tool for ratcheting up cooperative game-playing capacity.

Certain technologies push human societies to reorganize at a higher level of cooperation. As an example, Wright offered the Shoshone, a Native American tribe that lived in a territory with no big game to hunt but an abundance of jackrabbits at certain times of year. Because of their stark environment, the Shoshone normally existed at a simple level of social organization, with every extended family foraging for itself. When the rabbits were running, however, the families banded together into a larger, closely coordinated group, to wield a tool too large for any one family to handle or maintain — a huge net. Working together with the net, the entire Shoshone hunting group can capture more protein per person than they could working apart. Wright declared that "The invention of such technologies — technologies that facilitate or encourage non-zero-sum interaction — is a reliable feature of cultural evolution everywhere. New technologies create new chances for positive sums, And people maneuver to seize those sums, and social structure changes as a result."

Wright noted that people who interact with each other in mutually profitable ways are not always aware that they are cooperating; he cited evolutionary psychologists to assert that unconscious underpinnings of cooperation — like affection and indignation — are rooted in genetic traits:

"… natural selection, via the evolution of 'reciprocal altruism' has built into us various impulses which, however warm and mushy they may feel, are designed for the cool, practical purpose of bringing beneficial exchange."

"Among these impulses: generosity (if selective and sometimes wary); gratitude, and an attendant sense of obligation; a growing empathy for, and trust of, those who prove reliable reciprocators (also known as "friends"). These feelings, and the behaviors they fruitfully sponsor, are found in all cultures. And the reason, it appears, is that natural selection "recognized" non-zero-sum logic before people recognized it…Some degree of social structure is thus built into our genes."

"In the intimate context of hunter-gatherer life, moral indignation works well as an anti-cheating technology. It leads you to withhold generosity from past nonreciprocators, thus insulating yourself from future exploitation; and all the grumbling you and others do about these cheaters leads people in general to give them the cold shoulder, so chronic cheating becomes a tough way to make a living. But as societies grow more complex, so that people exchange goods and services with people they don't see on a regular basis (if at all), this sort of mano-a-mano indignation won't suffice; new anti-cheating technologies are needed. And, as we'll see, they have materialized again and again — via cultural, not genetic, evolution."

The cultural innovations that reorganize social interaction in light of new technologies are "social algorithms governing the uses of technology." Wright called these social methodologies "metatechnologies.". In the Middle Ages, the metatechnologies of capitalism — currency, banking, finance, insurance — pushed the hierarchical machinery of feudal society to transform into a new way of organizing social activity, the market. "The metatechnology of capitalism then combined currency and writing to unleash unprecedented social power." Wright claimed that the emerging merchant class pushed for democratic means of governance, not out of pure altruism, but in order to be free to buy and sell and make contracts. Throughout this process, powerful people always seek to protect and extend their power, but new technologies always create opportunities for power shifts, and at each stage from writing to Internet, more and more power decentralizes: "I mean that new information technologies in general — not just money and writing — very often decentralize power, and this fact is not graciously conceded by the powers that be. Hence a certain amount of history's turbulence, including some in the current era."

Definitions

The commons is a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest. Studies on the commons include the information commons with issues about public knowledge, the public domain, open science, and the free exchange of ideas -- all issues at the core of a direct democracy.

Common-pool resources (CPRs) are natural or human-made resources where one person's use subtracts from another's use and where it is often necessary, but difficult and costly, to exclude other users outside the group from using the resource.. The majority of the CPR research to date has been in the areas of fisheries, forests, grazing systems, wildlife, water resources, irrigation systems, agriculture, land tenure and use, social organization, theory (social dilemmas, game theory, experimental economics, etc.), and global commons (climate change, air pollution, transboundary disputes, etc.), but CPR's can also include the broadcast spectrum.

Issues

Whenever a group of people depend on a resource that everybody uses but nobody owns, and where one person's use effects another person's ability to use the resource, either the population fails to provide the resource, overconsumes and/or fails to replenish it, or they construct an institution for undertaking and managing collective action. The common pool resource (CPR) can be a fishery, a grazing ground, the Internet, the electromagnetic spectrum, a park, the air, scientific knowledge. The institution can be a body of informal norms that are disseminated by word of mouth, enforced by gossip or religious stricture, and passed from one generation to another, or a body of formal written laws that are enforced by state agencies, or a marketplace that treats the resource as private property, or a mixture of these forms. In the real world of fishing grounds and wireless competition, CPR institutions that succeed are those that survive, and those that fail sometimes cause the resource to disappear (e.g., salmon in the Pacific Northwest).

Elinor Ostrom's founding role in the evolution of an interdiscipline of cooperation studies grew from her challenge to currently accepted wisdom about institutions for collective action, her careful inductive examination of empirical studies of common pool resource management, and her insistence on interdisciplinary analysis. The dynamics she uncovered in her research - seven principles common to most successful, enduring common pool resource arrangements - are the starting point for anyone who wants to know how careful theoretical and experimental work can provide practical guidance for policy.

"The word commons originally denoted pastureland treated as a common resource, where individual herders were free to graze their sheep or cattle. The land can support a limited number of grazing animals. The temptation to graze more than one's share is a rational strategy for an individual herder. But if all succumb to the same temptation, the grass ceases to grow and the value of the pasture to everybody disappears."

In a 1986 lecture, Elinor Ostrom challenged the inexorable inevitability of Hardin's tragedy, noting that the situation described in Garrett Hardin's classic 1968 paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" has "the same underlying structure as the decision facing each prisoner in the so-called Prisoner's dilemma game." She also wrote:

"The Prisoner's Dilemma game has fascinated scholars in many fields. The paradox that individually rational strategies lead to collectively irrational outcomes seems to challenge a fundamental faith that rational human beings can achieve rational results. In the introduction to a recently published book, Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation, Richmond Campbell explains the "deep attraction" of the dilemma".

In her 1986 lecture, Ostrom emphasized the connection between the tragedy of the commons and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, but had the scientific curiosity to inquire whether tragically locked-in Prisoner's Dilemma strategies actually constrained human choice in all cases where humans have documented their use of common pool resources - she shrewdly understand that the cases in which people overcame the barriers to collective action are as important as the cases in which they fail:

"Scholars and government officials presume that all participants in situations with the structure of a PD game are necessarily trapped in the structure of the situation; as prisoners are trapped in their cells, participants are themselves trapped in their own mental apparatus. I shall argue that the structure is conceptually and methodologically necessary for analysis, but not an empirical necessity. The inability of participants to change the structure may be an empirical reality in some situations. It is not an empirical reality in many situations, however."

Ostrom argued from well-documented cases of informal institutions that had evolved into formal if localized arrangements, sometimes lasting for centuries, that groups could evolve effective institutions without externally coercive authority - if they could solve the "common set of problems." The design principles that Ostrom extracted from cases of successful CPR management turned out to be missing from most of the cases of failed CPR management she investigated - evidence that these design principles are clues to solutions to the problems preventing collective action in many instances. Ostrom argued forcefully that neither direct intervention by the state nor total privatization are necessary for people to evolve successful institutions - although state-provided courts lower the costs of creating the institutions, and the market value of well-managed CPRs provides strong incentive to create, agree, and maintain such arrangements.

Conclusions

Ostrom claims that "all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems." These problems are "coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules." Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member's behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

Hess and Ostrom detail the complex interdisciplinary definitions of "commons" and "public domain," establishing the discourse in the work of Scott Gordon in 1954 and Anthony Scott in 1955, who introduced economic analysis to fisheries, a natural resource that had traditionally been the domain of biologists. "Their two articles are credited with outlining the conventional theory of the commons." Hess and Ostrom also note the application of game theory as a way of rationalizing commons dilemmas in which "appropriation from common-pool resources is frequently represented as a one-shot or finitely repeated, Prisoner's Dilemma game. Since appropriators are viewed as being tapped in these dilemmas, repeated recommendations were made that external authorities must impose a different set of political regimes and property rights on such settings. Some recommended private property as the most efficient form of ownership. Others recommended government ownership and control. Ostrom and Hess note that the political-economy literature had, until recently, not considered the possibility that the appropriators of common pool resources would find ways to self-organize their use of the CPR. The ability to self-organize institutions for collective action that transform Prisoner's Dilemma games into Assurance Games, the obstacles to self-organization, and the strategies different groups have used to overcome these obstacles are the central themes of both Hess's and Ostrom's work. It is particularly important to note that Hess and Ostrom look to fisheries and irrigation arrangements precisely in order to bring empirical human reality to the abstractions of game-theoretic models. In turn, they use the principles that emerged from empirical observation to make theoretical models.

Hess and Ostrom emphasize that although all resources have other attributes, an important insight into the nature of public and private aspects of common pool resources can be gained by considering a matrix where excludability is plotted against subtractability: "Recognizing a class of goods that share these two attributes enables scholars to identify the core theoretical problems facing individuals whenever more than one individual or group utilizes such resources for an extended period of time. Using "property" in the term used to refer to a type of good, reinforces the impression that goods sharing these attributes tend everywhere to share the same property regime. As discussed below, this is certainly not the case."

Consider a two by two matrix in which the column on the left represents low subtractability and the column on the right represents high subtractacility. The row on top represents difficult excludability and the row on the bottom represents easy excludability. Comparing the rows and the columns, four combinations of attributes become visible:

• Goods that are low in subtractability and difficult to exclude appropriators are public goods such as sunset and common knowledge.
• Goods that are low in subtractability but easy to exclude are toll or club goods such as day-care centers or country clubs.
• Goods that are highly subtractable and difficult to exclude are common-pool resources such as irrigation systems and libraries.
• Goods that are highly subtractable but easy to exclude are private goods such as doughnuts and personal computers.

Different property regimes have been used with varying degrees of success in regard to each class of goods, from communal or state ownership to private ownership. Hess and Ostrom emphasize the situational importance of every human institution by disclaiming the possibility that rigorous analysis without reference to the actual situation can yield any formula for assigning a property regime to any particular class of goods: "Examples exist of both successful and unsuccessful efforts to govern and manage common-pool resources by governments, communal groups, cooperatives, voluntary associations, and private individuals or firms. Thus, no automatic association exists between common-pool resources with common-property regimes - or, with any other particular type of property regime." Together with attacking the confusion between the nature of a good and a property regime, Hess and Ostrom analyze the confusion between a resource system and the flow of resource units, the confusion between common-property and open-access regimes, and the confusion over what property rights are involved in "ownership."

Consideration of the governance of common pool resources, the authors note, moved from natural resource systems and human-made resources to such diverse goods as "surfer's waves, sports, national budgets, public radio, traditional music, indigenous knowledge, air slots, campus commons; urban commons [apartment communities and residential community associations, streets, parking places, playgrounds, reclaimed buildings etc.]; highways and transboundary transportation systems, the Internet [domain names, infrastructure, information, acceptable use policies]; tourism landscapes; cultural treasures; car-sharing institutions, garbage; and sewing.

Turning to the common-pool resource aspects of information, the authors distinguish between the interdependent but separate artifacts such as books, articles, web pages, databases, computer files; facilities such as private and public libraries and archives, digital libraries, e-print repositories, the Internet, or local-area networks; and content such as knowledge, information, and data.

For the past few centuries, a social machine has evolved to gather, store, and transmit knowledge; information stocks and flows are at the center of this enterprise. Until recent decades, scientific and scholarly information has been recorded, transmitted, and stored in journals, books, articles, academic and public libraries. Fair Use doctrine enabled libraries to provide inexpensive or free access to bodies of knowledge. The digitization of information and extension of copyright laws have brought about radical changes in the way scientific and scholarly knowledge is handled: "Since 1995, the development of distributed digital information through network browsers has radically c hanged many of the traditional institutions of scholarly communication. Research information is moving much faster and much farther, often bypassing the normal publication process. While it is true that recent commodification and privatization of research information threatens the future of libraries' freedom to collect and distribute information, it is only one part of the story. Recent legislation, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Sonny Bono extension Act, the proposed legislation of the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), may all adversely affect the costs, access, and availability of scholarly information."

Libraries are threatened because the publishers of scholarly digital information are seeking more money and more control while library budgets shrink. Librarians such as Clifford Lynch and legal experts such as Lawrence Lessig and Jamie Boyle have analyzed the forces that could make public libraries and public scholarship into anachronisms like scribes and illuminated manuscripts. Hess and Ostrom point at a countermovement that counters enclosure through technologies that enable collective action:

"In great contrast with the new legislation increasing copyright and patent restrictions, encouraging contract over property law with the constraints of embedded licensing agreements, is the international E-prints "revolution" that is making scholarly research freely accessible in unprecedented ways. The movement officially began with the mounting of arXiv.org at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Developed in 1991 by physicist and information specialist Paul Ginsparg, it was designed to serve as a repository for digital papers in physics and mathematics. By 1993, the site had received around 500 submissions. By September 30, 2001, the site had received 174,842 submitted papers. "The papers are free but unrefereed, requiring scholars themselves to judge the accuracy and quality of the work. This archive is the first that actually changes the representation and visibility of the scholarly record. The average number of site users range from 60,000 to 160,000 per day." There are hundreds of other digital archives. The Digital Library of the Commons http://dlc.dlib.Indiana.edu/ is both an e-print repository for self-archiving as well as a traditional digital library. An example of an effective grassroots initiative is that taken by the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit organization of scientists dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible "for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good."