Why does Growing the Commons need a knowledge commons?

An invitation to curate a shared resource for commoners

Photo by Lysander Yuen on Unsplash

Any answer has to start from the aims we have in Growing the Commons. One version states:

“At its heart, Growing the Commons exists to promote, support, and strengthen the Commons: a diverse ecosystem of community-driven systems, tools, and practices for producing, governing, and sustaining life’s essentials.”

This goes along with definitions of the Commons from contemporary writers such as David Bollier, who point out that a Commons involves, in my words:

1. a resource that is held in common;

2. a group of people who use and govern that resource;

3. the rules that they make regarding that resource (not some set of rules imposed by a higher authority).

A few decades back, Elinor Ostrom was looking at “common-pool” resources, resources or things that should be shared, but are limited or can be used up. In our current economic culture of inequality, those at the top get to enclose and monopolise things that are or might become scarce, and make the rest of us pay for them, by using markets that they dominate and control. To grow the Commons, in contrast, we seek to put life’s essentials back under the control of everyone who plays by the rules of common sense. These “commoners” come to care, not only for each other, but for life as a whole — the whole planet.

Down to earth, in Stroud, in Liverpool, and other places, common people are often immediately concerned with housing, with money, with energy, with local healthy food that isn’t poisoning us, the soil, or other life. Many have broader concerns. They may well be worried or concerned: with the way our current economy is pushing the climate into crisis; with increasing inequality; with the abuse of their personal data; with the way that banks work with money; with war; and so many other matters. Some of these can be directly related to commons – others indirectly – but all of them one way or another.

But, too often, they don’t know what they can do; or if they do, they don’t know how to do it, or who to do it with. Can they help start a commoning project? There is a very obvious need for somewhere for them to go to find out what they want or need to know. Question is, what should this knowledge source look like? How could it best work?

Let’s look at the common points of all of these concerns. We could ask, in every case…

• What are the range of commons and commoning possibilities in this area?

• What has been tried successfully before; or what looks promising?

• What is most likely to work in their particular situation? (Many possibilities depend on where you are, or what resources you have.)

• How do people actually set about doing it?

• What conditions, tools, equipment, etc. are needed?

• Who can help others set up, either locally or remotely?

• Who else is interested in the same area, and may want to join them?

Now, it may be that somewhere on the Web these things are answered. But can you find them? And even if you can find something relevant, how do you know how good the information is? The need is for an accurate, reliable, up-to-date source of the required knowledge that is easy to navigate through, and as easy to understand as it can be. Sure, some things need deeper knowledge and experience, but there too, we need pointers and guides to how to gain that knowledge and experience that isn’t just there on YouTube.

This is where the idea of a knowledge commons is directly relevant. Even if one person spent their whole time maintaining this kind of knowledge base, the job would be overwhelming. It needs some of us, the ones that have the knowledge and experience, to join in creating this kind of resource. As with other commons, this knowledge commons is a resource (knowledge in this case), a group of people (we could call them curators) and a set of rules that the people agree between them.

Note that a knowledge commons is different in an important way from a commons of scarce things. Once knowledge is brought together, it isn’t depleted by being used — quite the opposite! The more it is used, the more it is known about, the more valuable it becomes. In this kind of commons, the “tragedy” is when people add misinformation, disinformation, spam, and anything irrelevant that makes it harder to find the good stuff — and that “pollutes” the knowledge resource. So the rules for a knowledge commons are not about who can take stuff, but who can add or edit stuff, and what kinds of stuff.

So why would you, or anyone, want to spend time building and maintaining such a knowledge commons? You may think, “Wikipedia!” but that’s a really special case that can’t be replicated for specialist areas of commoning. You may think “Lowimpact” – good thought! – but who is going to keep all those pages up to date, and add new ones?

Let’s imagine you work in a particular field relevant to commoning, and you have already bought into the idea that you’re not going to hide everything you know. Then, maintaining a knowledge commons with others in your field may be a valuable resource for you all, giving you much more than you would be able to assemble by yourself. You would have access to different perspectives, to help you avoid slipping into familiar but unhelpful ways of thinking, and instead to compare and contrast your experience with others.

Together with others, you could all use your collectively assembled knowledge to give training courses, with the added advantage that your learners / apprentices would be better prepared. In short, you could be coming together in a community of practice. Your group will be well placed for offering consultancy in your own field – even the big consultancy firms produce white papers to show off some of their expertise – or to participate in funded R&D programmes.

For sure, not all knowledge is suitable for this treatment. There are some areas of knowledge where a few big corporate predators are just waiting to pick up and use what you have gathered, with no reciprocity. But I suspect this is only a minority of cases. And recall that you will be providing a high-quality knowledge resource that will help your team to gain a reputation for being knowledgeable people — that could easily bring you more business. Looking for new people to join your collective? They could easily find your knowledge commons and come to you, saying that this knowledge is just what they were looking for, to develop their career.

Or, maybe, just maybe, you have already enjoyed your career in your own field, and you want to give back in the free time of your retirement. It does sometimes happen.

So what we are suggesting here is that there are good reasons why people may well want to come together to maintain (or “curate”) their particular section of a knowledge commons. That knowledge commons will serve several uses at once.

Please come forward and volunteer to be one of the curators; a member of what could become a new community of practice where you can collaborate with other commons-minded folk. (See my e-mail in my profile or click the button below. You can also share your thoughts via the forum.)