Knowledge Commons

Knowledge Commons

Description

This chapter provides an introduction to and overview of the knowledge commons research framework. Knowledge commons refers to an institutional approach (commons) to governing the production, use, management, and/or preservation of a particular type of resource (knowledge). The research framework supplies a template for interrogating the details of knowledge commons institutions on a case study basis, generating qualitative data that may be used to support comparative analysis. The framework was introduced to the literature by Madison et al. (2010) as a framework for researching ‘constructed cultural commons,’ a shorthand for shared resources composed primarily of products of the human mind, namely knowledge and information in scientific domains, domains related to arts and culture, and resource domains defined largely by their human-generated character and their intangibility. That shorthand has been refined in later work into the phrase ‘knowledge commons’, aligning the focus of the research with an earlier introduction by Ostrom and Hess (2007) to themes raised by ‘knowledge commons.’ Other research on related topics has characterized such resources as ‘information commons’, ‘intellectual commons’, ‘cultural commons’, ‘socio-technical’ commons, and ‘new commons’. Subdomains of research in these domains include scholarship on ‘data commons’, ‘research commons’, ‘spectrum commons’, and ‘scientific commons’. The word ‘commons’ has been applied for rhetorical effect to a variety of ideological and institutional forms, such as the ‘Creative Commons’ licensing enterprise. Those rhetorical applications of ‘commons’ terminology are not addressed here. For the purposes of this chapter, and to render the research framework inclusive and meaningful in a broad, comparative sense, the term knowledge refers to all of the domains identified in the previous paragraph and therefore to a broad set of intellectual, scientific, technical, and cultural resources. Differences among the domains and among the resources within them may be significant. Knowledge, information, and data may be different from each other in meaningful ways. The research framework described here is sufficiently flexible to permit researchers to capture both their commonalities and their differences in their respective ecological contexts. For similar reasons related to inclusiveness, potentially narrower definitions of relevant goods are avoided. Neither this chapter nor the framework limit its approach to precise distinctions among private goods, public goods, club goods, and/or toll goods. Commons refers to a form of community management or governance of a shared resource. Governance involves a group or community of people who share access to and/or use of the resource and who manage their behavior via an established set of formal and information rules and norms. ‘The basic characteristic that distinguishes commons from noncommons is institutionalized sharing of resources among members of a community’. Commons does not denote the resource, the community, a place, or a thing. Commons is the institutional arrangement of these elements and their coordination via combinations of law and other formal rules and social norms, customs, and informal discipline. Community or collective self-governance of the resource by individuals who collaborate or coordinate among themselves effectively is a key feature of commons as an institution. Self-governance may be and often is linked to other formal and informal governance mechanisms. Technological and other material constraints may play important roles in the constitution and governance of knowledge commons. Knowledge commons thus refers to the institutionalized community governance of the creation, sharing, and preservation of a wide range of intellectual and cultural resources. This chapter briefly describes the motivations for creation of the knowledge commons research framework. It reviews the content of the framework, indicating where appropriate how the framework builds on, but is distinguishable from, its most important antecedent, Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. This chapter briefly summarizes tentative conclusions from case study research completed to date and indicates important directions for future research.

Source Publication

Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons

Source Editors/Authors

Blake Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbloom, Dan Cole

Publication Date

2019

Knowledge Commons

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