The Digital Commons

“The ‘hyperchange’ of technologies and social networks”, affects every aspect of how knowledge, information and data are managed and governed (Hess and Ostrom 2007b, p. 9). As a result, knowledge – as an umbrella term for the tryptic of knowledge-information-data – is increasingly analysed and handled in practice as a commons. As immaterial resources, knowledge or digital commons are subject to social dilemmas of a different nature than that which is typical for material environments: escaping issues of rivalry, they are more subject to dilemmas such as degradation, enclosure, commodification (Hess and Ostrom 2007a), and lack of use due to excessive patent or copyright protections – a phenomenon known as the tragedy of the anti-commons (Heller and Eisenberg 1998). According to Hess and Ostrom (Hess and Ostrom 2007a), the academic study of these commons situated in the digital world emerges in the late 1990s from information scientists (Brin 1995; Gupta et al. 1997), legal scholars (Reese 1994; Benkler 1997; Hess and Ostrom 2003; Boyle 2003) as well as activists (Bollier and Watts 2002). On the practitioners side, the emergence of the Free

and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement in the 1980s is probably the most prominent example of how people struggling with issues of enclosure and commodification of shared knowledge – here software code – have designed a counter-strategy mainly based on the use of so-called copyleft licenses to safeguard a commons (Stallman 1999). Following Stallman, Lessig (2001) pointed in particular the risk of stifling creativity and innovation through abusive copyright policies and advocated instead for commons-oriented approaches. In 2001, he co-founded Creative Commons: an organization that offers a set of alternative copyright licenses that enable authors to allow sharing, remixing and reuse of their works while being credited for it. As of 2017, over 1.4 billion works have been released as Creative Commons (Creative Commons 2018) and the license is a key instrument to preserve all of Wikipedia content as a commons.

Digital or knowledge commons – we use the terms interchangeably although we are aware that the latter, broader, encompasses the former – such as Wikipedia or FOSS have often been studied through the use of institutionalist perspectives (IAD framework) borrowed to the seasoned study of environmental resources (Madison et al. 2010; Schweik and English 2013; Frischmann et al. 2014; Fuster Morell 2014). For Yochai Benkler (2006) the emergence of such digital commons has far reaching implications. Online collaboration gave rise to a new phenomenon he named commons-based peer production (CBPP), an emergent model of economic production that can outperform the traditional managed firm (Benkler 2006):

"Free software […] suggests that the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands. This is what I call “commons-based peer production.”" (Benkler 2006, p. 90)

In the wake of Benkler’s definition, numerous thinkers have seen digitally-enabled sharing as a potential for a radical economic transformation (Bauwens 2006; Botsman and Rogers 2011; Bollier and Helfrich 2012; Rifkin 2014).

Popularizing the notion of Sharing Economy, Botsman and Rogers (2011) attracted the most attention with a narrative where online collaboration enables a greater access to unused resources such as a spare room in an apartment. In just a few years though, from a declared alternative to hyper-consumption, the

Sharing Economy has been reframed by start-ups and their venture capitalists as yet another economic opportunity to extract wealth (Martin 2016), or what Evgeny Morozov (2013a) had early dubbed as “neoliberalism on steroids”. This appreciation is confirmed by a review of the literature (Murillo et al. 2017) as well as through the documenting of the increasing job insecurity inherent of the “gig economy” (Friedman 2014; Stefano 2015). The Sharing Economy has become synonym of “abusing the commons” (Healy and Gibson 2017). Facing this situation, commons-oriented movements spearheaded by organizations such as Shareable, Ouishare or the Peer2Peer Foundation have been the crucible of intense debates in imagining alternatives (Gorenflo 2015), eventually crystalizing around the concepts of Open Cooperativism (Conaty and Bollier 2015) and, in particular, Platform Cooperativism (Scholz 2016). In these approaches, peers are co-owning the platform and in some of the intended applications, municipalities are also envisioned as collaborative entrepreneurs in such cooperatives with ideas such as Munibnb: an alternative to Airbnb (Schor 2016; Scholz 2016).

Notably, the urban dimension has been quite absent from the digital commons discussion. However, the general question of the role of local governments facing the challenges (and opportunities) brought upon by digitalization has been largely discussed with the emergence of the Smart City discourse (Hall et al.

2000; Hollands 2008; Neirotti et al. 2014; Nam and Pardo 2011, 2011).

Successfully marketed by IBM (2009) at the end of the 2000s the concept has imposed itself as the dominant narrative articulating the digitalization of urban systems and has received tremendous support by policy makers (Caragliu et al.

2011). It has also received a large number of critiques for pushing down on local governments and their citizens a technocratic and market driven vision of city governance (Greenfield 2013; Sennett 2013; Kitchin 2014; Townsend 2014). Set in a neo-liberal ethos (Kitchin 2014), the wide-spread Smart City narrative does not conceive commons.

In stark contrast to the verticality of this approach, David Bollier (2016), an early and outspoken advocate of the commons, outlined a vision of how digital networks may transform the city into an open platform where local governments switch to a role of facilitators of empowered citizens who co-design their life conditions. In that process, for Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer in the Office of San Francisco Mayor “[open] Data is a medium for making government more porous” (Bollier 2016, p. 16). Liberated from enclosure by open licenses, open data is a striking example of a digital commons with a strong urban flavor; and,

possibly, an urban (digital) commons. And yet it has been seldom researched or documented as such.