What do I mean, and what are the biggest issues I see here?
There is energy in me today around knowledge commons. It's one of the things that I have felt for some time that is ‘mine’ to do, and it is a good feeling having the energy to engage strongly. What I have actually been doing for most of the day is around that. Near the start of the day I was continuing a conversation with Ria on the topic, which followed on from a conversation yesterday that took the place of me writing a journal entry. Conversation with Revathi promised more in this area. And for a lot of the rest of the time I was contributing to the aspiring knowledge commons which is the P2P Foundation wiki, and updating and improving articles around knowledge commons. So it's been that kind of day, with a humming, flowing feel to it. You might be able to track what I've been doing there (if you're allowed).
Ria and I were talking about knowledge commons, following on from my saying that I envisage one direction for broadening the reach of Collective Presencing is through building a knowledge commons. But what is that, exactly? Ria was perhaps expecting that it was an established area; I was saying, no, it's more like we are making it up as we go along. I personally have many ideas, but they are not yet smoothed and thinned out into textual explanations. Other people have used the phrase, not really for very long, apparently only since around 2005, and then without any generally agreed consistency in meaning. So it's not something that one can explain properly in one paragraph.
What I could say in one paragraph is that the idea of a knowledge commons, to me (and this seems to be roughly in line with many other people I have read) is about a body of knowledge – I would say, some explicit, but maybe also some tacit; some written down, but some only in people's minds – which is lived / run / managed as a commons, drawing on Elinor Ostrom's principles of what viable commons are, and how to govern them. A knowledge commons has characteristics different from a commons around a material resource, principally because knowledge isn't depleted by using it or sharing it. (In the literature, this is often called ‘non-rivalrous’.) If there is some version of a tragedy of unmanaged commons, it is different for knowledge than for depletable material resources. But all writers seem to agree that a commons comprises a resource; a group of ‘commoners’ who may use or contribute to that resource; and an effective form of governance of that common resource, which is run by those commoners themselves. The term ‘resource’ is used here very generally, and specifically includes value which is created as well as used by commoners.
You can see that above paragraph as simply a kind of definition. It says next to nothing about what the characteristics actually are of a knowledge commons that is useful, alive, thriving, valuable, engaging, and so on. It says nothing about the life of a knowledge commons in the outside world of competitive, privatised (and even neo-liberal) capitalism, complete with its increasingly grasping attitude towards intellectual property as one of the last remaining ways of extracting wealth and, perhaps inevitably (cf. Piketty) concentrating it at the top to further widen the gaps of inequality in the world.
So, where do I start, to turn the ideas I have read about, mingled and developed in my own mind, into some beginning of a useful framework for growing a knowledge commons, for example (as that's the example in front of my nose) for Collective Presencing, and the bodies of knowledge that it rests on, including about Circle Practice? I'll try to take it in daily doses, so not too much at a time. I find it natural (for me) to start with the overview, the big picture, the purpose, the intention. So I'll try to stay with that for today.
I chose the word ‘growing’ rather than ‘building’ in the last paragraph deliberately, because it is this flavour that I have found resonates with Ria as well as me. We will not be trying to build a static structure; but rather a living system, maybe even an ecosystem, using that term loosely. You could see a lot of traditional knowledge – or wisdom, maybe – as having this organic feel to it, perhaps a little like folk music. In every generation, every practice, perhaps even at every trial, the practitioners – the commoners, that is – take what has been passed down and adapt it to their own situation, passing on the ‘harvest’ of that experience to the people coming afterwards. But that traditional model doesn't seem to fit very well with our world at present. Most traditional passing on of knowledge has been lost, and replaced with formalised, structured processes which may be adequate for formalised, structured domains (like the professions of law, engineering or medicine) but either never existed, or are not longer active for the areas that need to grow rapidly if we are to change our collective economy to minimise the looming crises.
In my mind, the broadest scope of a knowledge commons, applied to a particular area of life, of practice, of skill, of knowledge, of competence, can be seen as combining all the aspects of all the kinds of knowledge, together with the methodology of passing on that knowledge, and the governance, that are needed to induct (or enculturate if you like) more people into healthy practice in that area of life, and thus to reproduce and evolve.
Take a very tangible, and I hope relatable example: growing organic food. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of ‘permaculture’ knowledge around. As well as the theory and principles, there is potentially a vast amount of knowledge: about what grows well here; about what to grow with what, right here; about the nutritional value of different crops that will grow here; about local pests, diseases and other risks and how they can be mitigated; and that's just scratching the surface from the top of my own head, and I have very little permaculture knowledge. And then there is the economics of production; the local food system; food preservation and storage; agricultural and horticultural machinery. Then dive into personal experience: what about the stories of how pioneer local organic farmers found a sustainable way forward?
That starts to spill over into a social, learning, mentoring side. Who, in my area or region, has tried producing this crop organically? What happened? What were their experiences, successes and failures? What would they advise? Are they willing to answer my questions? We're into the complex domain where so many things affect so many other things; what I do affects my neighbour and vice versa. The context becomes more and more vital to understand, beyond the mere ‘complicated’ stuff that could be organised and structured into a general training course. Learning no longer appears as the job of large centralised institutions. At least, if there is a large central institution, its job will not be to determine the curriculum, but to provide the tools that allow the knowledge commons to grow into every specific context where it is used.
Then, to extend the social dimension back into the technical, how can the growing of this knowledge commons be supported, so that it is not only easy to learn from, but easy to contribute to? How can this support system be governed in a way that is sustainable in terms of human effort, not just in terms of material resources? Wikipedia, often cited as a classic case of a (particular but unrepeatable) knowledge commons, has strengths and weaknesses, both as a social and a technical system, and I've read only a small part of that literature. Wikipedia is not a model we can rely on to build other knowledge commons.
To focus on that last point, what about the interaction, the mutual interplay, of the technical systems supporting this knowledge commons, and the social system that motivates and makes it alive? I'm sure there are gems of insight to be found in scattered writings, but even gathering those together seems like an endless task, and indeed a job for a knowledge commons in itself, the knowledge commons about issues around knowledge commons.
I don't want to try to summarise this. I want to express my commitment to following up as many of the issues that I can, of those that I have raised above. Not necessarily every day; but the focus will remain.
Topics: Knowledge commons
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