Types of knowledge commons wiki pages
Part 3 of an ongoing series on knowledge serving commons
The ideas presented here originated on Simon’s personal wiki. We’re republishing them here on Growing the Commons to bring them into the broader Commons conversation. If you’d like to explore the full set of wiki-articles, you can find them here.
In this piece, I propose various types or kinds of wiki pages in a knowledge commons serving the commons more generally. I focus on the commons, because this is written with the Growing the Commons (GtC) project in mind (incorporating lowimpact.org), and “commons” provides a good starting point. I have an eye also on the Bioregional Knowledge Commons (BKC) project I’m also involved with.
Subject categories are quite a different story, and which I expect may differ substantially between GtC and BKC. I’m proposing this page typology below, to make it easier for the readers of such documented knowledge to understand the kinds of things they are reading about, in a way that I hope is fairly universal across cultures, as well as projects. If we can agree on some common categories like this, it will then help towards the long-term goal of creating effective distributed (and interoperable) wiki systems.
Separately, the following post will look at the internal structure of potential wiki pages, on the assumption that we will be using a wiki, which has separate pages, each with their own URL (which can be noted, copied, passed around).
A good direction to start is to reiterate a very common definition of a commons from David Bollier, echoed by many others. A commons is, to quote Bollier,
“a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.”
Even just this short phrase gives several leads, and I’ll mix in ideas from Elinor Ostrom, as appropriate.
Kinds of wiki pages
To help readability, I will first just list the kinds of pages I envisage, and then I’ll outline the typical attributes, and some relationships, of each kind of page, along with some connections with schemas from other systems, and why I’m promoting their inclusion in a knowledge commons about commons. Each choice is justified in the frame of the commons, but the wider frame includes many alternatives to neoliberalism or state intervention, from small-scale self-provisioning, through the level of community and cooperatives (much of which GtC is bringing across from lowimpact.org), right up to large bioregions that transcend national boundaries.
A wiki page could hold information about:
a “resource” — not a very informative word. By resources, I mean:
natural things: including biological, chemical, geological, physical, etc.
“artificial” things: artefacts, machines, physical works of art.
immaterial resources: the content of a book, a paper, an authored writing, music, etc., that isn’t tied to one material instance; and any digital things.
a concept: a meaningful expressible term, including a type of entity.
a person: who is a particular kind of natural entity, having agency and responsibility.
a group of people: a formal organisation, a team, or a close informal group.
a place: a location represented in various ways for different purposes.
a gathering: the kind of event where people come together for a time in a place.
a story: a narrative about what has happened, what is imagined to have happened, or what might happen.
a practice: a repeated set of actions by a person or group, aimed at development.
a pattern: of all kinds, including governance patterns, design patterns.
a question: a description of an unknown that would be valuable to know.
And then, separately, there should be pages for landing, orientation or navigation, suitable for diverse people with their different backgrounds. So let’s now look at these different kinds of pages, and the relationships between the entities they represent.
Resource
These are the “resources” referred to in many definitions of the commons, so any knowledge commons about commons must represent them. Then also, REA accounting is based around Resources, Events and Agents. But care is needed with the word “resource”, because it is too easily misunderstood as referring only to use value and nothing else. Commons people are generally aware of these issues. We don’t just “use” the resources of the commons, we want to care for them, be their stewards, guardians or managers, and appreciate their intrinsic worth, as well as “using” them.
Just to give a few examples of the kinds of material “resources” that are of interest to commons, and could be commoned:
natural resources: e.g. fish; water; oil; forests; rivers; minerals;
stocks of food and useful materials;
manufactured goods, of too many kinds even to start naming.
These examples of resources are “rivalrous” and “depletable” – that is, they can be used up, consumed, killed, destroyed, spoiled, broken – and as they are limited, the more some people use up, the less there are for others. We can have knowledge about actual, specific resources, that exist in specific places, and which may have time boundaries. If they constitute commons, they are managed by specific groups of people. Specific resources have a history, however well known it is. Particular, specific resources can also be categorised into different types, and a type of resource is a generic concept, with no specific time or place. We want our knowledge commons to represent this generic knowledge about types of resources, as well as specific knowledge about instances.
Immaterial resources are somewhat different. To illustrate the difference, consider books, which can be seen both as material and immaterial. As material resources, books can be held in libraries, and their use can be shared. We could easily imagine a community owned library as a book commons. However, the actual value in books is generally, for non-fiction books, the information, knowledge etc. contained in them. The value can be copied independently of how they are embodied physically. The same goes for musical works: the music exists beyond the various performances of it, or the scores that denote it. That is quite different from depletable resources. Works of fiction are stories, and they have value in different ways. But again the work itself is not the same kind of thing as its realisation or embodiment.
“Thing” is a term even more general than “resource”, used in schema.org, but it also includes Event, Person, and Place, which we will be looking at separately.
Concept
A concept is immaterial, for sure, but is it a “resource”? On balance I would say not. Concepts are important, because they are used in different contexts, and form one of the links between other pages in the wiki. And they are particularly important for learning. Many things can only be understood along with understanding the concepts that are used to describe them — the terms we use for concepts serve as the language we use to describe many other things: specific instances of resources; stories; patterns; questions. So, the way that a concept wiki page can work is to have one or more definitions, perhaps in terms of other, simpler concepts. You could imagine the index to a textbook, pointing not only to places where a term is defined, but also places where it is used. In a wiki, that can be done with very little effort, simply by linking to the term from the significant places it appears. Then, the backlinks from the concept page will behave like an index for that concept.
As well as questions using concepts, questions can be about concepts. Respectful talking around definitions should lead to agreements about how terms are used in the knowledge commons. Also, it would be very useful to have common agreement around when a term is “just” a concept, and when it is complex enough to be classed as a pattern — patterns generally relate concepts together.
Person
People are essential to any commons. They may relate to the other things that are represented as pages, at least as follows.
People relate directly to other people, and they belong to groups: it is the groups that collectively use and govern common resources.
People may reside in places, have legal rights there, care about special places, or just identify with them.
People may attend gatherings.
People have history, which can be told in various ways in various stories.
People also are the narrators of stories.
People undertake or participate in practices.
People notice, perceive and express patterns.
People ask questions, and suggest or propose answers.
Unsurprisingly, people turn up everywhere in published ontology schemes, including one of the most general, schema.org.
In REA, people are one kind of “agent”, organisations being the other.
In ActivityPub and Activity Streams, people are represented as “actors”.
FOAF is an ontology from back in 2000, and that has a Person as a key part of its ontology, which like REA has a superclass of “agent”.
From the perspective of commoned knowledge, people can be contributors to, curators of, readers of, or learners about that knowledge. But as well as the people who have direct interaction with the knowledge commons, there are other relevant people, for instance those who have or had knowledge about commons, or may have written books about commons.
So, I suggest, it is worth having a wiki page for each person: contributors can write their own, like user pages in Wikipedia, and it is clearly useful to have a page about particular people like Elinor Ostrom, curated by the knowledge commons members. The point here would not be to duplicate the information that is already in Wikipedia, but rather to use the page as a reference point between mentions of the person, and to add information that is specific to the focus of the particular knowledge commons.
All cultures recognise people, though the balance of importance between individuals and groups varies.
Group
Commons are used, managed, stewarded, by a group of people who we generally call “commoners”. For Bollier, in the quote near the start, this is the “defined community”. Ostrom emphasised the need for clear boundaries around group membership, and this is true also for groups that manage knowledge commons. If this kind of group of commoners has a defined legal structure, it is easy to represent as a group. Also, I would say, even if the group is informal, provided they are in good communication and relationship, and if they are curating a part of the knowledge commons, it might be useful for the group to give itself a name, and have its own page. That would make it easy, for instance, to find people in the same group as someone else.
Other groups that we may want to describe include families, cultures, civilisations, clans, tribes, nations. If their practices include or included commons and commoning, then they may well be worth noting in a knowledge commons about commons. Similar considerations relate to bioregions.
Place
In particular instances of material commons, the resources are located in places. The commoner people may live nearby, too. These places could be defined in several ways.
Political or administrative units may or may not be significant to commons. Natural, rather than political, divisions of place may also be relevant. Bioregions will have their own species or populations of living things, and plants or animals, domestic or wild, within a particular area may be stewarded as commons. Cultural or linguistic regions may be significant in that culture and language may affect the way that people can associate around commons. Whatever kind of places are significant, it could be useful to give them their own page, so that the different commons in a place can be related. Again, it could well be useful for commoners to know who else is commoning in their bioregion or other region. For bioregions, place is even more essential.
Everyone relates to place in one or more ways, as space is a universal characteristic of our experience. Note that in many indigenous traditions, place is more personal and special than in modern “western” culture. In particular, places may be held as sacred, which limits what is allowed in that place for that culture, and that calls for sensitivity and respect from people who have not assimilated that culture. Thus, it is even more important that place is explicitly represented in knowledge commons generally.
Gathering
I’m using the term “gathering” here rather than “event” (the schema.org term) or “meeting”, as “event” is more ambiguous in English, and “meeting” currently suggests work. Here, as well as gathering, meeting, or event, I include a council, a conference, a festival, a party, a training, a residency, etc., and these could be relevant to a knowledge commons inasmuch as their subject is commons or commoning, or that they practice commoning of knowledge or other resources. People organise, as well as attend, gatherings. There may be defined organisations involved in organising gatherings; and sometimes gatherings are only open to members of a particular group.
Commons-oriented knowledge commons could serve to hold information about upcoming commons events and to disseminate outcomes from past events. It may be useful for someone to know who else attended a commons-related gathering, or who else is planning to participate in a future one.
Gatherings can be significant for sharing the kind of knowledge that goes into a knowledge commons; thus, some knowledge can be linked back to the meeting at which it was featured, composed, or extended. Gatherings may well have an overall guiding question, and it may be the kind of question that merits its own page.
I cannot imagine a culture that does not have some kind of relevant and significant gathering.
Story
Stories are so pervasive that they can even be overlooked as proper elements in a knowledge commons. A story can be either about what has happened, or about what might happen in the future, or might have happened in the past, either in the real world or in some imaginal or mythological world. Stories about commons are vital for conveying both real lived experience and cultural beliefs and values. There will never be just one story about a commons, a gathering, a place, a resource, a group, or even a person (a biography), but several, from different perspectives, with different focus or emphasis. Myths, fairy tales, etc. may also be valuable stories expressing culture and values. Either way, if the histories, the stories, the myths include commons and commoning, then we may want to point to the stories in a knowledge commons.
Stories may be particularly important within traditional cultures, where much of that culture’s wisdom is communicated through story and myth. This kind of story doesn’t have named identifiable authors, but is the product of cultural refinement over time. Traditional stories may be associated with particular storytellers – “the story as told by …” – other stories do have specific people as authors.
Stories about commons and commoning can be a powerful influence on people’s support for, enthusiasm about, or willingness to participate in commons and commoning. Thus, they surely belong as part of the knowledge that supports commons.
Practice
As with all of these terms, here as well I am trying to stay as close as possible to commonly understood (English) language terms. But to be clear, what is meant here is not “practice” in the sense that it isn’t the “real” activity. Common phrases that point to a useful meaning are: “I have a personal practice of taking half an hour of exercise every morning”; or “our usual practice is to hold a general meeting every month”. Meditation and prayer are examples of practices that can be individual or collective.
In a bioregional setting, it is helpful to look at practices – for instance, in agriculture, animal husbandry, seasonal activities – that result in the sustaining or improvement of the health of people and the bioregion as a whole. The term “practice” is rather stronger than just “habit”, which may or may not be meaningful, or beneficial. Practices are practiced for reasons, though the reasons may be quite diverse, and may not be obvious.
In the context of commoning, a helpful use of the term “practice” would be for specific examples of what people regularly do. As commoning might be a reinvention or restoration of old practices, it tends to involve us as actors, rather than observers of cultures that we are not brought up in. And going back to David Bollier’s definition at the start, practices and patterns are where the “protocols, values and norms” come into play.
Either observation or experience of practices over time may reveal useful or valuable patterns, in a way similar to the practice of architecture or software design, both of which have thriving communities of practice, from which useful patterns have emerged.
Pattern
David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (notable enough people to have their own pages in Wikipedia, as well as being significant for commons) edited a collection, “Patterns of Commoning” (a significant immaterial resource) the first part of which concerns patterns in the sense championed by Christopher Alexander in “A Pattern Language”. Several of the conversations I have had around commons have included a mention of this concept of patterns. In their subsequent book, “Free, Fair and Alive”, Silke Helfrich gave more detail in an appendix with the title “Notes on the Methodology for Identifying Patterns of Commoning”. On the other hand, many of the studies in “Patterns of Commoning” might better be seen as studies of commoning practice rather than explicitly expressing patterns.
In the BKC group, the current intention is to look at bioregioning practices, and find patterns within those. In the GtC group, there is already a keen awareness of pattern language, and patterns of commoning are envisaged as being represented in our knowledge commons. The current idea is that these patterns emerge from many experiences of commoning, not just one specific one. That is, patterns are reusable. But they are not hard and fast rules. They are more like guidelines, in this case, to help people design and run successful commons. They need to be evaluated and adapted to context.
A pattern involves a number of concepts — that is, a pattern is not just a primitive concept by itself, but a combination. The chapter by Helmut Leitner in the collection “Patterns of Commoning” gives three sets of attributes for patterns, and they all contain some generalisation of a context, a problem and a solution. The “problem” (or “challenge”) could easily be represented as a question, as immediately follows here. The chapter by Silke Helfrich that follows Leitner’s gives an even more detailed account, including some definite suggestions of a few patterns of commoning.
To recapitulate the connection between practices and patterns: the individual examples of, for instance, commons governance, or water management, are practices. If these are documented, the documentation may be an immaterial resource. Patterns of commoning, or bioregioning, should then be understood as useful generalisations or abstractions of these practices, ready to be considered and adapted to new bioregioning or commoning.
Question
I don’t know of any existing knowledge commons, or related wiki, which as yet gives questions the respect of having their own pages. This is understandable, in that if it’s a question, it doesn’t constitute knowledge as such, yet. But I do believe it is very important to have these, as questions have much power, and sit at the growing edge of knowledge.
Questions arise as important to our knowledge commons, in that we don’t know everything, and there are unresolved questions to do with commons, commoning and bioregioning (or any topic, for that matter) for which we have no definite answers. However, some caution is needed about which questions to represent with their own pages. We don’t want everyone to create a page for their own personal questions, as this may both confuse people and overload them with too much information. Personal, specific questions can be raised, discussed and answered better on a forum than on a wiki. But if several people find a good question that is unanswered, of interest to more than a few people, and is generative of new ideas, then giving that question its own page can be a way of relating it to interested people; to projects exploring it; to suggested solutions; and to practices and patterns.
Elaborating questions through dialogue is one good reason for having a forum linked to a knowledge commons wiki. Contributors to the wiki can give their opinion on answers to questions either in a forum, or in a commentary section of a wiki page, which will be covered in the following post, dealing with the structure within single wiki pages.
Guidance
Any useful website intended for wide use, and in particular a wiki, is likely to have several pages dedicated to helping newcomers to the site to find their way round, to know whether the information they seek is there. And what is relevant or of interest may well vary between different groups of people. I mention this here, but will not say more, as these matters are not specific to knowledge commons.
Aspects of knowledge commons ontology not represented on their own page
There are a few important attributes that could well serve as a useful part of the ontology of commons, and therefore of knowledge commons around commons, but do not merit their own page on this kind of wiki, as having a page would add little value and likely be far too many in number to be manageable or helpful.
Date and time: these belong more to a calendar than a wiki. Times and dates can be associated with several of the entities above: a person has a birth date and some have death dates; resources can be time-limited or be available at certain times; gatherings and events happen in time; practices are enacted in specific times and places. Though Wikipedia does have a page for each year and month as a way of cross-referencing significant dates, this is much less likely to be useful for commons in general, unless there were a serious interest in and use of commons history.
Point location: point locations can be used for map interfaces, but unlike geographical areas like political or bioregional units, they don’t belong as separate pages, as they cannot be enumerated.
Action, transaction or activity: these belong in structured records of what has happened, or what has been practiced, linked to date and time and maybe location. They are good for recording in databases, or blockchains, to be sure that the records have not been tampered with, but not as individual wiki pages — by nature, they are far too numerous. These are finer grained than Story or Gathering above: like individual economic transactions (like REA “events”, not limited to money), or activities as in ActivityPub noted above. It makes sense to me that these are acknowledged as essential aspects of a wider commons ontology, and also that they clearly cannot be reasonably represented individually with their own wiki pages.
These considerations suggest considering linking a knowledge commons wiki together with maps, calendars or accounting systems, as may be appropriate.
Looking forward
I’ve set out what seems to me to be a good set of different kinds of pages that I can easily imagine in a knowledge commons wiki. One of the reasons to set out these different kinds of pages is that each kind will have a likely structure, and relate differently to other pages, both inside and outside any particular knowledge commons wiki.
So, I will take this forward by looking next at the structure of a knowledge commons wiki page, and after that a deeper look at the relationships between these different kinds of things, reflected in the links between their respective wiki pages.
sharing comments ‘fyi’ from a recipient associate…
“under resources, lists fish, forest. These are physical material resources. A fish is not knowledge. Information or "knowledge" (personalized/internalized) is immaterial, so why do you again push me stuff by people who advocate and remain in the Ostrom fallacy (omission/lack) of not addressing that knowledge commons are in a totally different and opposed ecomomy/ruleset based on that the goods/resources are immaterial.”
could be they misconstrued @Simon Grant ?