Magisteria of the Commons

Domain-specific alliances

What is missing is a convergence between these two worlds, that of local productive communities engaged around the common access to vital contributory common goods, and that of the capacity to global coordinate such projects around the world, and finance them

cosmo-localization, i.e. the combination of interconnected local commons with global (‘cosmic’) digitally enhanced cooperation, may be superlinear, and thus, exactly what is needed to ‘inflate’ the commons.

But surely, purely local commons, which have been under centuries of pressure in the capitalist order, are not enough to be such a counter-weight ? Indeed, they are not

zebras unite

beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable.

Michael Sonenscher

Users run self-sovereign Knowledge interoperability hubs within their own browsers. They can connect to collaborate with other

Notions such as the common good, commonsense, and common culture could sometimes cause as many prob-lems as they purported to solve.

“democratic” portion of democratic culture?

“The crux of the issue is we’re thinking about the focus on encampment closure without access to housing,” said Charley Willison, a Cornell professor who has studied the influence of police on cities’ homelessness policies.

These institutions are designed to support individuals and their habitats, reversing the current dynamic where people and their environments appear to serve institutions.

continent of coherence"

Friedman called such benefits ‘neighbourhoodeffects’—the benefits that come from services that aren’t paid for.

The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

he decimation of the existing incentive models for internet creators and communities (as flawed as they are) is not a bug: it’s a feature

the tragedy of the Commons is not so much that it's Commons per se but that it's a cooperation problem that he described I 00:01:48 think very clearly that environmental degradation is often a social dilemma is often a cooperation problem and be it a commons or not the regulatory structure 00:02:02 or the the social structure can vary but cooperation problems are are important however of course he said his famous line this paper is you know solution is mutual coercion mutually agreed upon and and so that's 00:02:18 institutions right so the solution is institutions and of course we have other people who have said that very clearly and with a lot of wonderful evidence to back it up Elinor Ostrom being at the 00:02:31 top of that list and and her work on common pool resources and contains this fantastic list of sort of key design 00:02:44 elements that have emerged from studying small-scale common pool resource communities and and these are these are factors that tend to make those communities more successful in managing 00:02:56 those resources sustainably so so that's great

Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6

tighter regulations and highercorporate taxes increase costs and make firms and nations less competitive.

The real issue with "learning in public" is them emphasis placed on "being an expert," which is *everywhere*. It's a capitalist mindset, convincing people that even as beginners they should consider themselves "experts" bc this is how you get exposure aka how u scale.

to do our own work to develop our own teams to 00:13:48 grow our own networks so based on that we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding not just sustainable ideally regenerative 00:14:01 systems with possible externalities they're not just sustaining themselves at some level but actually creating a lot more value around themselves and we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks 00:14:13 so we decided to throw an event uh last year uh so it's less than a year ago um there's probably a number of other people that helped put this on if um uh i in my memory yesterday i remembered a set of folks who are here uh which i 00:14:26 want to thank for for driving this and really creating this this event but it really takes a village to put this on especially the pl events team um uh and many others who have helped uh and since then we've now had uh three 00:14:37 events two virtual one and one in person and we're scaling the community in the size of the conversations the um systems that we're reviewing the mechanisms that we're exploring the studies that we're doing and so on uh so 00:14:50 in this conference we've gone from you know 11 18 talks and now 56 really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously of course you can do that of course you can later in time they're all recorded 00:15:02 and we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space great uh 00:15:15 thanks to the github community and shelling point and many other manila groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures so all of this leaves me uh very hopeful um you know our impact so far has been 00:15:28 to explore a set of funding mechanisms here's a few uh that i pulled from the youtube uh channel a bunch of these mechanisms are explained explaining explored and so on some of them also have kind of experimental review still early days so 00:15:41 a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic not very well experimented upon and so on but i'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same 00:15:53 level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that we've also [Music] sort of revived the impact certificates um 00:16:05 idea and and field we've um gotten to explore a number of novel entity types i know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things um and we've 00:16:19 created some uh we've talked about some coordination systems that could be um extremely useful i think this is a very promising area but probably under under um understudied and an area that that is 00:16:31 maybe harder or seems um diffic much more difficult to get traction on so it doesn't get studied as much

There’s many examples around the world of communities banding together to collectively govern a shared resource, like forestry, grazing grounds, and wells.

Who can integrate bidi links into a larger system, expand in concentric circles, and take them to their logical conclusion — ubiquity across all information surfaces. ... Across Closed Worlds (Chat, Notes, Projects) to Open Worlds (Twitter, Blogs, Feeds) & everything in between The [[wiki link]] is just like #'s and @'s — public-domain innovations in hypertext. But just cause your social app has @'s and #'s doesn't mean people will use it.

DoS a federal agency, then charge for access

contrasting 00:28:28 climate change against uh the kobe 19 pandemic is very revealing while both of them are now considered to be a crisis and they are very different in nature 00:28:40 the pandemic is an immediate threat and the government failure to respond to the the kubernetes pandemic is in the eyes of the constituencies 00:28:54 a real failure and and they will uh lose their future votes and because of this failure for these politicians while climate change is more of a 00:29:07 creeping uh risks it's coming slowly it is a crisis and uh and it's also everybody's crisis right then this is a a typical 00:29:21 collective action problem failure to come up with the funding for addressing climate change in the eyes of the local and domestic 00:29:33 constituencies is not considered to be such a bad thing so uh and then a lot of politicians will choose to be a free writer on this then 00:29:45 uh you know what happens and we all understand this too well will be the tragedy of the comments i think the it's really the nature of the this uh two problems to crisis are very different 00:29:58 and this is really really the talent the i think the ultimate talent for the human beings to when it comes to solve this collective action problem

Land rezoning and infrastructure decisions, such as rezoning from industrial or farmland to residential land, or building a new transport hub, generate windfall gains to private owners. While some of this is captured in the form of development contributions, the private value capture is much greater than what it contributes back to public coffers.Rezoning of land and infrastructure investment decisions undertaken by government create enormous amounts of private value:Throughout Australia, when land is rezoned from industrial to high-rise residential, a charge is levied to help fund the required infrastructure. A well-situated industrial site in Sydney’s inner west was bought for $8.5 million, rezoned high density residential, then sold again for $48.5 million. The 470% windfall was the result of a government decision: rezoning.

Twitter, the president of one major cultural institution told me, “is the new public sphere.” Yet Twitter is unforgiving, it is relentless, it doesn’t check facts or provide context.

reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create

“Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”

I worked on a recent project to sketch out for a centre-right German think-tank how a European data commons might work. I tried to steer it away from property rights and towards what you’d get if you started with the commons and then worked back to what data could be harnessed, and to which collective purposes. This is eminently do-able, and pushes you towards two distinct areas; groups of people who are served poorly or not at all by current data regimes, and existing cooperatives, unions and mutual societies who could collect and process their members’ data to improve collective bargaining, or licence access to it to generate revenue and boost affiliate membership. Viewing personal data as a collective asset points towards all sorts of currently under-provided public goods (I briefly describe several, on p. 74 here – yes, oddly enough, this stuff got shoved into an annex).

I particularly enjoyed the California water commons, with its quiet nod to Elinor Ostrom’s original post-graduate research on emergent cooperation between county water-boards.

banning DDT also seemed ludicrous until it wasn’t.

If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can't really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.

What this means is: I better refrain from writing a new book and we rather focus on more and better docs.

Meanwhile, politicians from the two major political parties have been hammering these companies, albeit for completely different reasons. Some have been complaining about how these platforms have potentially allowed for foreign interference in our elections.3 3. A Conversation with Mark Warner: Russia, Facebook and the Trump Campaign, Radio IQ|WVTF Music (Apr. 6, 2018), https://www.wvtf.org/post/conversation-mark-warner-russia-facebook-and-trump-campaign#stream/0 (statement of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.): “I first called out Facebook and some of the social media platforms in December of 2016. For the first six months, the companies just kind of blew off these allegations, but these proved to be true; that Russia used their social media platforms with fake accounts to spread false information, they paid for political advertising on their platforms. Facebook says those tactics are no longer allowed—that they've kicked this firm off their site, but I think they've got a lot of explaining to do.”). Others have complained about how they’ve been used to spread disinformation and propaganda.4 4. Nicholas Confessore & Matthew Rosenberg, Facebook Fallout Ruptures Democrats’ Longtime Alliance with Silicon Valley, N.Y. Times (Nov. 17, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democrats-congress.html (referencing statement by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.): “Mr. Tester, the departing chief of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, looked at social media companies like Facebook and saw propaganda platforms that could cost his party the 2018 elections, according to two congressional aides. If Russian agents mounted a disinformation campaign like the one that had just helped elect Mr. Trump, he told Mr. Schumer, ‘we will lose every seat.’”). Some have charged that the platforms are just too powerful.5 5. Julia Carrie Wong, #Breaking Up Big Tech: Elizabeth Warren Says Facebook Just Proved Her Point, The Guardian (Mar. 11, 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/11/elizabeth-warren-facebook-ads-break-up-big-tech (statement of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)) (“Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let's start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power. Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single censor. #BreakUpBigTech.”). Others have called attention to inappropriate account and content takedowns,6 6. Jessica Guynn, Ted Cruz Threatens to Regulate Facebook, Google and Twitter Over Charges of Anti-Conservative Bias, USA Today (Apr. 10, 2019), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/10/ted-cruz-threatens-regulate-facebook-twitter-over-alleged-bias/3423095002/ (statement of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)) (“What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency, the invisibility, the ability for a handful of giant tech companies to decide if a particular speaker is disfavored.”). while some have argued that the attempts to moderate discriminate against certain political viewpoints.

Capitalists and market-thinkers inevitably seek to enclose the commons, privatizing benefits and externalizing costs onto society.

Put another way, many tools for thought are public goods. They often cost a lot to develop initially, but it’s easy for others to duplicate and improve on them, free riding on the initial investment. While such duplication and improvement is good for our society as a whole, it’s bad for the companies that make that initial investment. And so such tools for thought suffer the fate of many public goods: our society collectively underinvests in them, relative to the benefits they provide

More information about CC and open licensing

Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons by On the Commons

More information about the Commons

In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a biologist, published an article about social dilemmas in the journal Science, called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’.

I am not, and will never be, a simple writer. I have sought to convict, accuse, comfort, and plead with my readers. I’m leaving the majority of my flaws online: Go for it, you can find them if you want. It’s a choice I made long ago.

The classic libertarian solution to this problem is to try to find a way to privatize the shared resource (in this case, the lake).

The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.

Experienced maintainers have felt the burden. Today, open source looks less like a two-way street, and more like free products that nobody pays for, but that still require serious hours to maintain.This is not so different from what happened to newspapers or music, except that nearly all the world’s software is riding on open source.