Information commons

This chapter reviews the history and theory of information commons along with the various conceptual approaches used to describe and understand them. It also discusses governance, financing, and participation in these commons. Today’s digital technologies offer unprecedented possibilities for human creativity, global communication, innovation, and access to information. Yet these same technologies also provide new opportunities to control—or enclose—intellectual products, thereby threatening to erode political Information Commons 2 discourse, scientific inquiry, free speech, and the creativity needed for a healthy democracy. Advocates for an open information society face an uphill battle to influence outcomes in the policy arena; yet they are developing information commons that advance innovation, stimulate creativity, and promote the sharing of information resources. Designers of these new information resources can learn from those who have studied other commons like forests and fisheries. Multidisciplinary research needs to go beyond rejecting enclosure to assessing whether alternatives are viable. This requires applying a framework for analysis to determine whether information commons are sustainable as a fundamental information structure for the 21 century. In this chapter, we conceptualize a phenomenon, a social construction that has become known as the information commons. In a sense, it poses a paradox because while the digital technologies at its core offer vast opportunities for creativity and communication, these same technologies provide opportunities to erode political discourse, scientific inquiry, and free speech; to bar access to intellectual products; to enclose democracy. Our focus is the employment of these technologies for the purpose of organizing information in order for it to be shared by a community of producers or consumers. Generalists and specialists use the term information commons loosely, as both metaphor and actual fact, singular and plural, a usage pattern to which we conform. We frame this chapter around the problem of the information commons as an idea with attributes of community, governance, rights, access, openness, patterns of participation, efficiency, equity, distribution, infrastructure, and conflict management. It is our contention that information commons promise a fresh paradigm for advancing innovation, stimulating creativity, and promoting resource sharing. Not only do they offer Information Commons 3 a response to the challenges posed by enclosure, but they also offer an opportunity to build a fundamental institution for a 21stcentury democracy. COMMONS IN THEORY Americans jointly own, share, and administer a wide range of common assets, including natural resources, public lands, schools, libraries, and scientific knowledge. Yet, supporters often encounter hostility when seeking public funding to sustain these essential resources, especially at a time when the marketplace dominates political priorities, even though neglecting them impoverishes culture and endangers democracy. For this reason, “most democracies use a combination of market and nonmarket devices” such as government publications, public libraries, and public broadcasting to assure that citizens get the information they need (Baker, 2002, p. 73). Historically, the “commons” meant those agricultural fields in England to which certain farmers, called commoners, held rights and responsibilities, such as the planting of crops or the grazing of animals. Between 1500 and 1800, however, many of those common fields were converted into private property in order to boost agricultural production, redistribute population, advance industrial development, and ultimately bring lands under the control of wealthy aristocrats. Enclosure occurred both piecemeal and by general legislative action, for no single decision nor act caused the enclosure of public fields–a story similar to today’s enclosure of the commons of the mind. In the end, this “enclosure” movement transformed a traditional, communal method of agriculture into a system in which ownership of property alone determined use rights (Yelling 1977; Turner, 1984). Information Commons 4 Yet, if the enclosure movement eclipsed the commons, it also launched a debate over rights of access. Lawyers and economists have traditionally considered ownership either within the realm of a marketplace for the exchange of private property or a market failure requiring government management. Resources such as common property have fallen between this private-public ownership dichotomy (Hess & Ostrom, 2003). The 1861 publication of Ancient Law by Henry Sumner Maine (1986) fueled this debate about whether landed proprietors have a special role needing legal protection, and about the legitimacy of enclosing communally owned properties. In the mid-1950s, H. Scott Gordon (1954) and Anthony Scott (1955) kicked off their own debate about the commons by introducing an economic analysis of fisheries in two articles that outlined a theory of the commons. Then, Garrett Hardin wrote his now-famous 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which used the example of overgrazing to argue that unlimited access to resources results in excessive demand and, consequently, in overexploitation. His thesis quickly gained acceptance among those proposing personal self-interest as the sole motivator behind the exploitation of shared resources. Unwilling to concede Hardin’s argument, scholars from several disciplines countered with studies of common property resources, where group control over the resource need not lead to overuse, but rather to the balancing of benefits and costs (National Research Council, 1986; Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom, 2002; Ostrom, Gardner & Walker, 1994; Bromley, 1992; Heriter, 2002; Buck, 1998). Prominent among these counter theorists is Carol M. Rose (1994, p. 141) who proposes a reverse of the tragedy of the commons; where, for certain types of activities, individuals may choose to “underinvest,” rather than to over-exploit. At a festival or on a Information Commons 5 dance floor, for example, the more who take part, the greater the benefit to each participant. “Activities of this sort may have value precisely because they reinforce the solidarity and fellow feeling of the community as a whole; thus, the more members of the community who participate, even only as observers, the better for all.” Rose refers to this type of behavior as the “comedy of the commons,” with the connotation of a happy ending because indefinite numbers and expandability of participation enhance rather than diminish value. She elaborates on this idea using the phrase “the more the merrier” and analogizing to economies of scale, where the larger the investment, the higher the rate of return. Rose contends that people need encouragement to join such nonexclusive activities, where their participation produces beneficial “externalities” for others. Scholars such as Siegfried Ciriacy-Wantrup and Richard Bishop (1975) distinguished between two types of legal regimes that govern commons: open-access (or “no property”) regimes and common property regimes. With open access regimes, nobody has the legal right to exclude anyone else from using the resource, thus the tragedy of the commons may ensue because of overuse or destruction. By contrast, common property regimes, which regulate the use of “common pool resources,” provide members of a clearly defined group with a bundle of legal rights, including the right to exclude nonmembers from using the resource; thereby, promoting the comedy of the commons. Such common-pool resources also resemble what economists call public goods, such as parks, public transportation, police and fire protection, and national defense. Their challenge stems from the difficulties involved when common pool resources management is based on intensity of use and delineation of eligible users; for Information Commons 6 neither common pool resources nor public goods can easily exclude beneficiaries (Stevenson, 1991). Others have explored the emergence, efficiency, and stability of common property regimes. Carl Dahlman (1980, p. 6), Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom (1997, pps. 7, 914), and Glenn G. Stevenson (1991, p. 47) contest the conventional view in economics that communal ownership and collective control are necessarily inefficient. They maintain that, under certain conditions, economic theory predicts that, such arrangements are superior to private ownership and individual control. Furthermore, Stevenson (1991, pps. 54-57) has identified seven useful characteristics that distinguish common goods from public and private goods: (1) well defined boundaries; (2) well-delineated group of users; (3) multiple users of the resource; (4) well-understood rules; (5) shared rights to use the resource; (6) competition for the resource; and, (7) well-delineated group of rights holders. His examples include communal forests in Europe that are group-managed for a limited, well-defined community, as well as grazing lands available to residents of a particular village during certain pre-determined dates for a limited number of animals. A leader in the field, Elinor Ostrom has studied the actual workings of common property resources, and observed that common property regimes regulating these resources are distinguished by group, rather than individual control (Ostrom, 1990; 2002); the group is then responsible for balancing benefits and costs, defining who may participate in resource use and to what degree, as well as designating who will make management decisions. With her colleague Edella Schlager, Ostrom underscores that it is “the difference between exercising a right and participating in the definition of future Information Commons 7 rights to be exercised ... [that] makes collective-choice rights so powerful” (Schlager & Ostrom, 1992, p. 250-251). Further challenging the presumption that all common-pool