Commons

The commons is the central economic frame of Nadia Eghbal’s Working in Public: rather than treating open-source projects as “communities,” some observers describe them as a commons — “a resource that is owned, used, and managed by a community,” governed by self-imposed rules rather than outside intervention to avoid over-provisioning or depletion. The book anchors this on Elinor Ostrom’s eight design principles for a well-managed commons (clear membership boundaries, rules matching conditions, affected parties able to modify them, community-accountable monitoring, graduated sanctions, low-cost conflict resolution, external recognition, and nested layers of authority), and on her later “digital commons” work where knowledge is the shared resource. (source: Working in Public)

Yochai Benkler’s commons-based peer production supplies the production model: unlike a company that must solicit, hire, and manage employees, the members of a commons “simply self-organize based on who wants to do the work most,” theoretically selecting the best person for the job at lower cost by removing property and contract. Benkler names three conditions — Intrinsic Motivation (“the currency of the commons”), modular and granular tasks, and low coordination costs; when coordination costs (reviewing code, merging contributions) outpace the benefits, “the commons breaks down as a useful production model.” Eghbal also picks up the “cornucopia of the commons” / Network Effects idea that information goods gain value as more people participate (“the more, the merrier”), and Kyle’s open question on the page is what the playbook is for creating a commons-based project. (source: Working in Public)

Context: A commons is a shared resource managed collectively by its users; Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel in economics for showing that communities can sustainably self-govern common-pool resources without privatization or top-down regulation, work later extended to “knowledge commons” like open-source software and Wikipedia.

Where this appears

• Working in Public — the book’s governing economic lens for open source: Ostrom’s commons design principles and Benkler’s commons-based peer production.