unmediated: Cooperation, Biology, Commons, and Online Communities

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April 29, 2005

Cooperation, Biology, Commons, and Online Communities

(via Clippings.reblog)

What Can Evolutionary Science Teach Us About Designing Online Commons? is David Bollier's blog post about a workshop held yesterday at Harvard, From Personal to Impersonal Trusted Exchange in The Physical and Digital Domains: An Evolutionary Perspective. This effort is very close to the work we are doing with The Cooperation Project. I'm going to see if the parallel efforts can harmonize. (The Cooperation Project is looking for funding for our next phase -- contact me if you have any tips):

Professor Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, the great pioneer of commons scholarship (or in academese, “common-pool resources”), gave a rich overview of the principles that define the commons. I was struck by her observation that the existence of the commons depends upon “the shared understanding of symbols." To illustrate her point, Ostrom showed a photo of a snow-bound street in Boston with a folding chair placed on a shoveled-out parking spot. This commons, she explained, consisted of the shared understanding in the neighborhood that anyone who shovels out a parking spot is entitled to “own” the spot for the duration of the snow.

The chair symbolizes the power of informal, community-originated rules. The mayor of Boston didn’t want to recognize the vernacular symbols of property rights – chairs and ladders in parking spots – and had them hauled away, inciting huge protests. The commons fights back against the state!

Ostrom noted that traditional economics singularly fails to explain how property rights are assigned in the first place; it just assumes that law and order and fully rational individuals are there. In addition, economics presumes that order originates from a central source, like government, which is supposed to apply uniform “scientific” policies based on aggregate data to large and diverse terrains, largely ignoring local knowledge and citizen participation in fulfilling policies. (Citizens are presumed to be ineffectual.)

The lesson of much commons scholarship, however, shows that sustainable order frequently arises from the self-organization of people in local contexts. While property rights can be handled in many ways (private property, government-owned property, etc.), the specific property regime is less important than establishing clear property boundaries and effective monitoring of them.

Via Clippings.reblog

Originally posted by Howard from Clippings.reblog, remediated by yatta on Apr 29, 2005 at 12:11 PM