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.”
I’m curious and would like to engage your associate. In other places, including https://wiki.simongrant.org/doku.php/d:2025-07-30 but not particularly here, I have been extremely clear that material and immaterial resources have a different potential “tragedy” if unmanaged.
So maybe it’s my lack of explicit inclusion of this point in this particular piece that causes a problem? We could make analogies with other really important issues, when someone doesn’t mention that issue up front, everywhere.
Checking round for a more holistic view is encouraged!
You start out here with a definition of commons by David Bollier and too relying on Elinor Ostrom. While these might be applicable to physical and therefore inherently scarce resources of the material world, it's of no help for the knowledge commons, which consist of immaterial goods, which become more abundant the more these get shared and used.
Examples I cite is the Sigil E-book editor, where the developers and maintainers left the project (for whatever reason, might be personal or other). Authors and users went into some worry that the software would not get bug fixes, new releases or might get entirely de-published. But as the Sigil software for libre-free licensing was in the digital commons, anybody and others could pick it up again and continue it, for whichever purposes of their own, which some did. So there can be many different communities developing some shared commons or parts or variants of it, into very different and opposing directions, without a need to agree on protocols or norms, other than for the digital commons to not get hijacked or siloed into proprietary exclusive property (be it by copyright or artificial restrictions). Which includes some digital commons being completely abandoned, which is fine. Can be picked up and continued, or merely used, by anybody for any purpose, for as long as it remains in the digital commons and doesn't get enclosed. Another example being the Wikipedia: if the Wikipedia operators and maintainers would just disappear entirely today, no need to worry, you and I and anybody else can just download the export, and continue it in any way, as many people do, doing various different things with this digital commons, not all of which might be supported or intended by the norms, expectations and demands by the WikiMedia organization.
For some reason, there seems to be an extreme worry about the "tragedy of the commons", which is only applicable to material commons of getting destroyed by over-consumption. For digital commons, the opposite is true: the more it gets used and shared/spread, the more the immaterial commons get protected against loss, and the more benefit they bring to any user/recipient, for making their production more beneficial and worthwhile, including by any and all later free-loaders (production and unit cost economics are just very different for a unit good that's inherently not scarce). The single protocol or norm needed to protect the digital commons from destruction is to prevent any party to lock it in and exclusively encapsulate & control the common good from access and rights for other users.
The bottom line for a summary and definition is, that any immaterial good like, say, knowledge or a secret, once shared with another party, it's duplicated and subsequently co-owned. Even more so if represented in the form of digital data, because then with ubiquitous quasi-cost-per-unit-duplication, it's by its inherent nature not scarce nor enclosable/siloable. Attempts to introduce some social demands, requirements and constraints are mostly optional and voluntary, because their enforcement is ultimately futile. What some people try nonetheless, are currently the methods of legal copyright persecution, and/or artificial technical degradation/restrictions. The digital knowledge commons instead explicitly recognize, state and demand that their goods are always co-owned by every subsequent recipient, and never restrictable or exclusively controllable by anyone or any particular party. The tragedy of the commons as endangering physically scarce resources by over-consumption, do not apply for knowledge, as there's no way to destroy or deplete these, except for loss (against which any copy and free-rider and what not helps, as is enabled and permitted to redistribute the immaterial commons good).
The alternative to the latter is you're in the business of erecting artificial walls and fences and restrictions and contracts, which go against the inherent abundancy nature of the immaterial good, engaging in the same practices as any other proprietary silo/property, which tries to exclude people from what they naturally & technically could do with an obtained immaterial knowledge resource.
Just imagine for a moment the scenario in which a non-group-member (someone you have never heard about before, or maybe never will) benefits from or makes an independent improvement/correction to a knowledge resource – what a *TERRIBLE* loss and depletion of the knowledge resource that would be! Rather exclude this person for not being a member and prevent this case. Great. Isn't this the point of the commons in the first place, to grant everybody access, for as long as they don't deplete and destroy the stock/supply? To be for common benefit? How to possibly deplete the supply of a resource that is infinite? With a resource that inherently never depletes, but only duplicates and multiplies?
This is all decent stuff, Stephan, but I wonder if you have actually read my piece on the tragedy of the knowledge commons? https://wiki.simongrant.org/doku.php/d:2025-07-30 It isn't depletion, it's pollution. You can see this happening every day on open forums, where people come in and spam with whatever product or service they are offering. I recommend (to you or any other readers) following up on the topics of knowledge pollution or information pollution (see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_pollution )
OK I'm sorry, I wrote a detailed reply of how/why curation & selection regarding quality and quantity is a different issue from a resource's or any pool's state as a commons resource, and that making decisions about & enforcing policy is up to any arbitrary number of non-exclusive groups and individuals, but then I clicked on a button to get rid of the cookie banner, and this junk of website (as frequently happened on many other sites or in the WWW browser), and all of the draft is now forever lost.
For reasons like these, I don't see why even engage in/with this kind of today's garbage tooling and sink/waste the time & effort non-productively right into the trash. Same lack of decent tooling might artificially creates/perpetuates your other problems, which do not need to exist or to be created/entertained in the first place.
Besides tooling/functionality per se, one typical source is centralized hosting/operation, where there's accounts and permissions and administration that can grant and reject/revoke access and modification/publishing permissions on their instance (which is fine in itself and does not necessarily harm the resource/pool as a commons, as there can be any number of other instances as well as local/private copies not impacted by administrative policy enforcement in a single place), here's an example for a description https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html and there's various ways software-wise to not create or mitigate this source of a "problem" (of administrative gatekeeping/lockout/exclusion). Which also naturally doesn't exist, if not deliberately set up in this fashion in the first place.
I'm sorry, please go and look how Wikipedia/MediaWiki is doing review + export, or git branching / forking + "pull request" = submission -> accepting, merging or rejecting, or too curation-wise Pete Forsyth for judging credibility of news outlets regarding citations in the Wikipedia, or what the Canonical Debate Lab regularly debates about (but not sure yet if they have much or any tooling out), etc.
"Pollution" is standard decisions by any individual or group that maintains their selection/set/pool/collection of commons resources artifacts, and theirs having no impact on anyone else.
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 ?
I’m curious and would like to engage your associate. In other places, including https://wiki.simongrant.org/doku.php/d:2025-07-30 but not particularly here, I have been extremely clear that material and immaterial resources have a different potential “tragedy” if unmanaged.
So maybe it’s my lack of explicit inclusion of this point in this particular piece that causes a problem? We could make analogies with other really important issues, when someone doesn’t mention that issue up front, everywhere.
Checking round for a more holistic view is encouraged!
You start out here with a definition of commons by David Bollier and too relying on Elinor Ostrom. While these might be applicable to physical and therefore inherently scarce resources of the material world, it's of no help for the knowledge commons, which consist of immaterial goods, which become more abundant the more these get shared and used.
Examples I cite is the Sigil E-book editor, where the developers and maintainers left the project (for whatever reason, might be personal or other). Authors and users went into some worry that the software would not get bug fixes, new releases or might get entirely de-published. But as the Sigil software for libre-free licensing was in the digital commons, anybody and others could pick it up again and continue it, for whichever purposes of their own, which some did. So there can be many different communities developing some shared commons or parts or variants of it, into very different and opposing directions, without a need to agree on protocols or norms, other than for the digital commons to not get hijacked or siloed into proprietary exclusive property (be it by copyright or artificial restrictions). Which includes some digital commons being completely abandoned, which is fine. Can be picked up and continued, or merely used, by anybody for any purpose, for as long as it remains in the digital commons and doesn't get enclosed. Another example being the Wikipedia: if the Wikipedia operators and maintainers would just disappear entirely today, no need to worry, you and I and anybody else can just download the export, and continue it in any way, as many people do, doing various different things with this digital commons, not all of which might be supported or intended by the norms, expectations and demands by the WikiMedia organization.
For some reason, there seems to be an extreme worry about the "tragedy of the commons", which is only applicable to material commons of getting destroyed by over-consumption. For digital commons, the opposite is true: the more it gets used and shared/spread, the more the immaterial commons get protected against loss, and the more benefit they bring to any user/recipient, for making their production more beneficial and worthwhile, including by any and all later free-loaders (production and unit cost economics are just very different for a unit good that's inherently not scarce). The single protocol or norm needed to protect the digital commons from destruction is to prevent any party to lock it in and exclusively encapsulate & control the common good from access and rights for other users.
Ostrom and Bollier don't seem to have much to say about immaterial resources, and instead for example why not consider Richard Stallman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfggz2vj06g or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eginMQBWII4 or a brief description about the plurality/non-exclusion and practice by young Bruce Perens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7YckQp1sQo or Cory Doctorow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg or the League of Noble Peers https://archive.org/details/StealThisFilmII or Michał Woźniak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFp1dCyAIQI - if you start out with the tragedy and whatever protocols and norms of the physically scarce commons as an analogy for the immaterial commons, there's no analogies and only confusion (which then needs to be undone/unlearned/forgotten again), as these are completely different in terms of their economics and properties.
The bottom line for a summary and definition is, that any immaterial good like, say, knowledge or a secret, once shared with another party, it's duplicated and subsequently co-owned. Even more so if represented in the form of digital data, because then with ubiquitous quasi-cost-per-unit-duplication, it's by its inherent nature not scarce nor enclosable/siloable. Attempts to introduce some social demands, requirements and constraints are mostly optional and voluntary, because their enforcement is ultimately futile. What some people try nonetheless, are currently the methods of legal copyright persecution, and/or artificial technical degradation/restrictions. The digital knowledge commons instead explicitly recognize, state and demand that their goods are always co-owned by every subsequent recipient, and never restrictable or exclusively controllable by anyone or any particular party. The tragedy of the commons as endangering physically scarce resources by over-consumption, do not apply for knowledge, as there's no way to destroy or deplete these, except for loss (against which any copy and free-rider and what not helps, as is enabled and permitted to redistribute the immaterial commons good).
The alternative to the latter is you're in the business of erecting artificial walls and fences and restrictions and contracts, which go against the inherent abundancy nature of the immaterial good, engaging in the same practices as any other proprietary silo/property, which tries to exclude people from what they naturally & technically could do with an obtained immaterial knowledge resource.
Just imagine for a moment the scenario in which a non-group-member (someone you have never heard about before, or maybe never will) benefits from or makes an independent improvement/correction to a knowledge resource – what a *TERRIBLE* loss and depletion of the knowledge resource that would be! Rather exclude this person for not being a member and prevent this case. Great. Isn't this the point of the commons in the first place, to grant everybody access, for as long as they don't deplete and destroy the stock/supply? To be for common benefit? How to possibly deplete the supply of a resource that is infinite? With a resource that inherently never depletes, but only duplicates and multiplies?
perhaps you would like to read what I have written about the tragedy of the knowledge commons?
This is all decent stuff, Stephan, but I wonder if you have actually read my piece on the tragedy of the knowledge commons? https://wiki.simongrant.org/doku.php/d:2025-07-30 It isn't depletion, it's pollution. You can see this happening every day on open forums, where people come in and spam with whatever product or service they are offering. I recommend (to you or any other readers) following up on the topics of knowledge pollution or information pollution (see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_pollution )
OK I'm sorry, I wrote a detailed reply of how/why curation & selection regarding quality and quantity is a different issue from a resource's or any pool's state as a commons resource, and that making decisions about & enforcing policy is up to any arbitrary number of non-exclusive groups and individuals, but then I clicked on a button to get rid of the cookie banner, and this junk of website (as frequently happened on many other sites or in the WWW browser), and all of the draft is now forever lost.
For reasons like these, I don't see why even engage in/with this kind of today's garbage tooling and sink/waste the time & effort non-productively right into the trash. Same lack of decent tooling might artificially creates/perpetuates your other problems, which do not need to exist or to be created/entertained in the first place.
Besides tooling/functionality per se, one typical source is centralized hosting/operation, where there's accounts and permissions and administration that can grant and reject/revoke access and modification/publishing permissions on their instance (which is fine in itself and does not necessarily harm the resource/pool as a commons, as there can be any number of other instances as well as local/private copies not impacted by administrative policy enforcement in a single place), here's an example for a description https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html and there's various ways software-wise to not create or mitigate this source of a "problem" (of administrative gatekeeping/lockout/exclusion). Which also naturally doesn't exist, if not deliberately set up in this fashion in the first place.
I'm sorry, please go and look how Wikipedia/MediaWiki is doing review + export, or git branching / forking + "pull request" = submission -> accepting, merging or rejecting, or too curation-wise Pete Forsyth for judging credibility of news outlets regarding citations in the Wikipedia, or what the Canonical Debate Lab regularly debates about (but not sure yet if they have much or any tooling out), etc.
"Pollution" is standard decisions by any individual or group that maintains their selection/set/pool/collection of commons resources artifacts, and theirs having no impact on anyone else.