A Commons on Monday

Abstract

A pasture has a limit. Every cow added takes grass that another cow cannot eat. That property, which economists call subtractability and which Ostrom treated as a defining feature of a common-pool resource, is why the pasture needs governing at all. Some shared things do not behave like that. A proof, a recipe, a song, a method of irrigation or a piece of software is not used up by being used. One reader's understanding of an idea does not reduce another's. In 2007 Elinor Ostrom and the librarian Charlotte Hess published a collection of essays, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons , that asked what the design principles might mean for resources of this kind. Their answer was careful. Knowledge is not subtractable in the way grass is, but the things that carry it are: the attention of the people who maintain it, the funding of the libraries that hold it, the trust of contributors who might stop contributing. A knowledge commons can be overgrazed too. What is overgrazed is the care.