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."

Anticommons property is defined to be a class of property in analogy to the commons in classical economic literature to explain some of the failures and difficulties in the transition from communist to market economies. Multiple owners have privileges in a resource in a commons. The overuse of that resource has been described, notably by Hardin, as the tragedy of the commons. Heller defines an anticommons property as a scarce resource in which multiple owners have the right to individually exclude others from its use, and no one has an effective privilege of use. Stalemate results in the , the underuse of a property.

Heller examines a paradox in Moscow after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Storefronts remained empty even though the economy was growing and there was demand for consumer goods. In contrast, street kiosks in front of them filled with goods and customers.

He maintains that the phenomenon is due to a tragedy of the anticommons, an underuse of scarce resources due to the allocation of multiple new owners with the rights to exclude others from its use.

He compares the distribution of rights in commercial property (previously owned by the state with overlapping bureaucratic stakes) with other types of properties (e.g., individual apartments, communal apartments, and street kiosks.) In the latter cases, sometimes legal but more often brutally questionable means of resolving rights disputes results in more widespread use of resources in the absence of appropriate legal recourse.

While Heller devotes most of his attention to the underuse of commercial property in Moscow and other cities in the former Soviet Union, the notion of the anticommons has implications in the distribution of environmental and intellectual property rights.

Anticommons property may emerge in developed markets wherever new property rights are being defined. This can occur when new technologies make possible uses of, for example, intellectual property and environmental rights, unanticipated by the previously existing legal mechanism.

Once anticommons property appears, it is difficult to remedy the situation either through markets or subsequent regulation. Rather, Heller argues that care must be taken to avoid the accidental creation of anticommons property when new property rights are being defined by conveying core bundles of rights rather than multiple rights of exclusion.

The “second enclosure movement” attempts to put fences around the intellectual commons of ideas and facts in a manner analogous to the enclosure and transfer of property rights from the public to the private sphere during the first enclosure movement in England that fenced off common areas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. A new way of thinking about the public domain, the intellectual commons, is needed to combat the negative impact of this trend.

Limits on intellectual property rights are being eroded by specious arguments about the need to protect against piracy and to encourage innovation. Historically there was a sense that any grant of intellectual property rights, effectively a state granted monopoly, was to be strictly limited in term. In fact, the erosion of those historical limits through legislation and extensions of intellectual property protections like business method patents, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and patents on the human genome can be argued to decrease the possibilities for collaborative creation traditional in domains as varied as science, law, education, and music.

The first enclosure movement can be viewed as a “revolution of the rich against the poor”, it was justified by the incentives it offered for large-scale investment, for the control it offered over exploitation, and for the efficiency of exploitation of resources. It was said to “avoid the tragedies of overuse and underinvestment,” a conclusion that is subject to some debate.

The second enclosure movement is the similar much more recent application of intellectual property law to “the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind”: things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.

Advocates of the second enclosure argue that the extension of property rights is essential to create incentives to invention. Opponents point to the restrictions and bottlenecks on innovation and, in the case of the human genome, the claim that it is the “common heritage of humankind belonging to everyone.”

Dangers:

• Propertization is a vicious circle. Once something is made private it’s hard to take it back.
• To enclose the intellectual commons requires throwing away or restricting the characteristics of the Internet that made it so effective a force for innovation.
• The arguments for enclosure are analytically unsound and often based on the vested interests with financial abilities to sway lawmakers.

The notion of intellectual property has had critics through its history: Jefferson was concerned with the state creation of unbounded monopoly. He felt that intellectual property rights might be necessary, but should not be treated as natural rights and should be strictly limited in term.

The concept of public domain as applied to intellectual property is a relatively recent construct. Copyright is a system designed to feed the public domain providing temporary and narrowly limited rights. The public domain is “a commons that includes those aspects of copyrighted works which copyright does not protect.”

The Internet expanded rapidly because its core protocols, TCP/IP and HTML, are open.

A global network transforms the nature of creativity by introducing new ways of collaborating: examples include the free software and open-source software movement.

The free software and open-source software movements may serve as models for thinking about alternative ways of dealing with intellectual property which encourage collaborative innovation while offering creators the ability to distribute their inventions for financial gain. These movements stand squarely on intellectual property: they build on a living ecology of open code where the price for participation is a commitment to make incremental innovation part of the ecology.

Lessig defines a commons as “a resource that is free. Not necessarily zero cost, but if there is a cost, it is a neutrally imposed, or equally imposed cost.”

The General Public License (GPL) of the open-source software movement encourages continuing improvement by making source code for software and its modifications available for members of the community. Continuous, peer-monitored improvement is encouraged without violating individuals’ rights to distribute products for financial gain. Presumably the best solutions are adopted by the community.

Boyle proposes using the concept of “public domain” for intellectual property, a relatively recent term in legal discourse, as a rallying point for combating the erosion of the intellectual commons in much the manner that the concept of the “environment” was used to create a coalition of disparate self-interests.

The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework developed by the Ostroms and their colleagues at Indiana University provides a foundation for studying a multitude of theories, models, and predictions of public choice behaviors in different systems of governance and organization.

Frameworks define the action arena to which it would be applied; the resulting patterns of interactions and outcomes, and the means of evaluating those outcomes.

A framework is a general language about how varying rules, physical and material conditions, and attributes of a community affect the structure of action arenas, the incentives for actors, and resulting outcomes.

Action arenas include an action situation and the actors in that situation.

An action situation includes:

• Participants
• Positions
• Outcomes
• Action-outcome linkages
• Control that participants exercise
• Information
• Cost and benefits of outcomes

Actors (individual or corporate) involve:

• Resources brought to the situation
• Values assigned to states of the world
• Methods for dealing with knowledge and information
• Selection processes for courses of action

Analysts can make strong predictions in tightly constrained situations of complete information: overuse of resources in an open commons where the actors do not share access to collective choice arenas.

Results are not as clear in situations where actors are embedded in communities with norms of fairness and conservation as well as the ability to communicate with each other.

Evaluation criteria can include a range of values for categories such as the following:

• Economic efficiency
• Fiscal equity among actors
• Redistributional equity (e.g., policies to care for poorer individuals
• Accountability
• Conformance to a general morality
• Adaptability to change

The IAD framework has been applied to various domains to make predictions of resulting behaviors in field settings. Examples of successful application include:

• Police services
• Urban public services in general
• Common-pool resources: these were studied in laboratory as well as field settings. The IAD framework was used to create a theory of behavior. Communication of participants affects behavior: if no communication was permitted, the results approximated that of non-cooperative game theory. Communication led to different, more positive, results.
• The IAD framework was used to develop extensive databases coding common-pool resources and diverse property regimes.

Social theorists of the late nineteenth century, such as Comte, Durkheim, Marx, Spencer, Tonnies and Weber, along with anthropologists of indigenous peoples have argued that with industrialization, modern societies will inevitably experience a decline in the norms that protect communal life. Throughout the twentieth century, in place of these norms, markets, states, and contractual obligations emerged as the appropriate means of dealing with common property. Nevertheless, recent scholarship on common property has shown that users are successful in distributing benefits "equitably, over long time periods, and with only limited efficiency losses." Three papers on the commons, by Wade (1994), Ostrom (1990), and Baland and Platteau (1996), have sought out facilitating conditions for sustainable common-property institutions, albeit through different empirical methods. Their overlapping principles are a good starting place for crafting successful institutions for collective action, but their work can also be used as a stepping ladder to more rigorous studies and predictive conclusions.

Wade argues that environmental risks help push people toward interdependence and defending their crucial commons. He also points to limited numbers of users who are not scattered over a large area, proximity between users and resource, clear boundaries of the user group and resource, easy detection of rule-breakers, graduated sanctions, low-cost exclusion technologies and recognition of local authority by central government as other facilitating conditions. These conditions are duplicated in much of the other literature on commons.

Ostrom lists eight design principles and qualifies sustainability on the legitimate acceptance of rules and obligations of the institution by subsequent generations of users. For her interests in long-term sustainability, Ostrom looks to successful long-standing institutions for her guiding principles, rather than starting with theoretical, causally-linked variables and then picking her sample. She cites as important principles, along with Wade, clear boundaries on user group and resource, homogeneity among users, locally-devised rules that are easy to implement, graduated sanctions and recognition from the central government.

Baland and Platteau confirm that regulated common property systems can be just as efficient as private property systems. They list principles that overlap with those mentioned above, also including past experiences of cooperation, external aid and strong leadership. They do not delve into how different factors might interact with each other, but instead list them as facilitating conditions in general.

Missing from the three articles is extensive attention to resource characteristics. For example, climatic information would be a significant factor in possibility of regeneration of an agricultural resource and the migratory patterns of a herd would be serious limiting factor for its local management. Small group size might not be a facilitating condition in certain situations, considering the "mobility of the resource, and volatility and unpredictability in the flow of benefits from a resource." Contextual factors like demographic conditions or local market demands, while not emphasized in any of the three articles, can be crucial factors in the viability of a commonly managed resource.

The traditional framework of the organization of economic production includes two modes of production: individuals order their productive activities either under the direction of managers at firms, or as individuals in markets following price signals. Free Software is one example of a broader social-economic phenomenon that Benkler calls 'commons-based peer production', a new, third mode of production in digitally networked environments. In order to explain the emergence of this third mode of production Benkler augments the traditional production framework. Because of the highly variable nature of human expertise, and given a pervasively networked information economy, commons-based peer production has advantages over the two traditional forms of organization. The paper concludes with a discussion of the problems of motivation, loss of motivation, and integration in peer production enterprises. Benkler concludes that (1) "Given a sufficiently large number of contributions, direct monetary incentives necessary to bring about contributions are trivial." and (2) "Peer production is limited not by the total cost or complexity of a project, but by its modularity, granularity, and the cost of integration."

The paper concludes with a discussion of the problems of collective action and how they are solved in the absence of property and the presence of high transaction costs of monetary compensation. Relevant factors include the fact that the resource being produced (information) is non-rival, that problems are divisible into a fine level of granularity, the ability to provide integration (quality control and handling of contributions) in a socially acceptable manner, that the pervasively networked information economy provides access to a large number of potential contributors, and the willingness of contributors to accept non-monetary rewards.

Benkler posits that understanding peer production in the same framework as the mainstream economic theory of organizations could explain the emergence of commons-based peer production. The mainstream economic theory of organizations says that individuals organize into firms whenever the cost of achieving an outcome is greater using a price system. Peer production emerge whenever the cost of peer-based production is lower than either market-based or firm-based production. Property rights emerge whenever the value of a resource is such that its utilization through a property-based appropriation offsets the cost of implementing and enforcing the property rights regime. Commons emerge when the cost of implementing a property regime is higher than the opportunity cost of the property. Market and firm based production can be divided into property based production and commons-based production. Peer-based production fits well into the framework with plenty of examples of both property based production (e.g., Xerox's Eureka) and commons-based peer production (e.g., free software, academic science, Wikipedia).

The emergence of peer production is tied to a pervasively networked information economy. Commons-based peer production has systematic advantages over market and firm based production when (1) the object of production is information or culture, and (2) the physical capital necessary for production is widely distributed. Both of the advantages of peer production are a function of the variability of human capital. First, commons-based peer production has an advantage of having a lowest cost of determining who is the best person for a given task (Benkler calls this 'information opportunity cost'). Second, it has an advantage of allocation efficiency where large groups of potential contributors interact with large groups of resources in the search for new tasks. That is, the practice of firms -- and to a lesser extent markets -- of securing access to limited sets of contributors and resources through contracts and property entails a systematic loss of productivity.

Benkler addresses the problems of motivation, loss of motivation, and integration in peer production enterprises. Benkler concludes the following:

• "Given a sufficiently large number of contributions, direct monetary incentives necessary to bring about contributions are trivial."
• "Peer production is limited not by the total cost or complexity of a project, but by its modularity, granularity, and the cost of integration."

Two kinds of actions represent threats to motivation (1) (the most important) unilateral appropriation by an individual or group of the project and (2) some behavior affecting the intrinsic value of participation for contributors (e.g., failure to integrate a contribution). Free-riding is a common demotivating action in commons. Since information is non-rival, free-riding is a non-issue so long as the pool of contributors is sufficiently large and the act of free-riding does not undermine production. In this sense, 'Absence of exclusion' is the organizing feature of commons-based peer production. Finally, integration requires (1) a quality control or integrity assurance mechanism, and (2) a method for combining individual contributions into the whole.