There are so many different aspects of knowledge that can be held in common, or controlled by power.
I was distracted by a great Collective Presencing session today, and extremely late for a call with a knowledge commons researcher which should have followed straight on. But the remaining time he kindly gave was enough to raise my passions to write more about knowledge commons.
The two are connected: I've been talking with Ria for some time, suggesting that we should create a resource where people can learn from the collected knowledge and experience of our little group of practitioners, if we can call them that – at least, our little group of hosts and co-hosts of collective presencing sessions. But for today what I feel I need to write is about the generalities that came up in my delayed conversation.
We talked about the fact that many established academics treat the concept of knowledge commons as simply to do with the legal governance, including intellectual property and licencing regimes. This seems to be the position taken by the Governing Knowledge Commons team, and indeed reflected in the Wikipedia article on knowledge commons. Wikipedia currently states that
The term “knowledge commons” refers to information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet. What distinguishes a knowledge commons from a commons of shared physical resources is that digital resources are non-subtractible; that is, multiple users can access the same digital resources with no effect on their quantity or quality.
which I find disappointing on several counts, including the unfortunate assumption that a commons is just a shared resource. If you share this assumption, then Garrett Hardin's idea of the “tragedy of the commons” makes sense – but then as scarce unmanaged subtractible / rivalrous common resources last only a short time, why call them commons? This misses the whole point made by the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, that effectively governed commons can be highly successful and long-lasting.
In line with others as far as I know in the P2P Foundation, I take a commons to refer to a wider system, including (in my own words): the resource that is shared; the community of commoners who use and manage that resource; and the governance processes by which the community allocate and maintain the resource. See, for example, the P2P wiki page on Commons.
The opposite problem comes from taking a knowledge commons as a kind of closed system, with the three components mentioned, where the purpose of the commoners is simply to maintain that body of knowledge as an end in itself. But this does not make good sense either. The closest example that I see here is Wikipedia itself. But are Wikipedians actually using the knowledge they contribute to? Typically not, as Wikipedia editors are discouraged from authoring articles where they are too close to the subject matter, as they would then be less likely to have a “neutral point of view”. What are Wikipedians doing, then? It seems to me that they are playing an elaborate game that happens to produce a reasonably reliable source of encyclopedic information as a by-product. The gamification of knowledge.
One other widely quoted example of knowledge commons is open source, or free software. This does look more like a commons; though while the people who write the code often also use it, the governance is never (to my knowledge) fully participatory. The field of open standards for information systems, which I have been deeply involved with, is even harder to categorise, and the community is less stable, generally dependent either on government funding, or being resourced from the software industry. Governance of open standards can be a sore point. But in both these cases, the knowledge is an integral part of a wider system, and makes no sense taken in isolation.
I have come to the conclusion that a knowledge commons is best understood as a partial system – it is the knowledge-related aspect of a community of practice. So what knowledge does a community of practice generate, maintain, govern and use? Many kinds, for sure. In examples like those studied by Ostrom, the knowledge may be held in people's memory and transmitted orally, perhaps with some of the most essential agreements written down. But as this current pandemic limits face-to-face interaction, what is needed shows up more clearly, particularly when it is missing. I'm sure I've made a list somewhere, but as this is not meant to be definitive, I'll just list what I can recall, in a rather random order.
As knowledge is only effectively held in common if it can be found and communicated, it makes sense also to include the systems to support finding and communicating all that knowledge. But the knowledge commons does not include the material objects themselves, or the people themselves – rather, they play a part in the commons system understood as a whole.
How people manage or govern a commons system seems to be also split between transmittable knowledge and embodiment. Yes, commoners need knowledge about the commons system, perhaps drawn from the above, in order to be able to govern effectively. But making decisions is a human act, not an item of knowledge.
So, what is the point of conceptually separating out the knowledge commons aspect of a commons? To me, it is about being able to draw a helpful line between the most meaningful and significant aspects of commons – the people themselves, and the natural resources involved – and what is able to be facilitated (or not) by information systems. I take the human and natural world systems as primary, and I want to design information systems to serve humanity and the planet.
The other significant reason for this split is to emphasise what can be managed in ways that are not commons. All of the kinds of knowledge listed above can be governed hierarchically and extractively, enclosing the knowledge within information systems that prevent people from having enough knowledge to be free to realise their own potential. Calling it a knowledge commons stresses a way of interacting where knowledge of these kinds is shared freely, in accordance with its non-subtractible nature – indeed its value often grows through sharing. A hierachically governed and controlled information system might still be called a knowledge management system, but if decisions about who is allowed access to what knowledge are made by a power elite, for self-serving ends, it would better be called a knowledge enclosure system,1 and could not properly be called a commons.
People collectively have potential that can easily exceed the imagination of any one individual. When people come together in cooperation, in collaboration, to co-create, or to work together for some generative purpose, they may be helped or hindered by the nature and quality of what passes between them as knowledge, learning, or just information. People can fail to collaborate – how many have tragically gone to war rather than collaborating.
That points, in a general way, to why my aim is to see as much as possible of this knowledge managed as knowledge commons, not as knowledge enclosure systems.
↑ 1: At first I wrote “knowledge control system”, but this term is already widely used – what might this imply in terms of cultural norms? Calling it a “knowledge enclosure system” avoids this question, following well-established usage among commons writings.
Topics: Knowledge commons
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