Digital commons (economics)

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The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created. [1] [2]

Contents

Examples of the digital commons include wikis, open-source software, and open-source licensing. The distinction between digital commons and other digital resources is that the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources. [3]

The digital commons provides the community with free and easy access to information. Typically, information created in the digital commons is designed to stay in the digital commons by using various forms of licensing, including the GNU General Public License and various Creative Commons licenses.

Early development

One of the first examples of digital commons is the Free Software movement, founded in the 1980s by Richard Stallman as an organized attempt to create a digital software commons. Inspired by the 70s programmer culture of improving software through mutual help, Stallman's movement was designed to encourage the use and distribution of free software. [4]

To prevent the misuse of software created by the movement, Stallman founded the GNU General Public License. Free software released under this license, even if it is improved or modified, must also be released under the same license, ensuring the software stays in the digital commons, free to use.

Today

Today the digital commons takes the form of the Internet. People and organisations can share their software, photos, general information, and ideas due to the digital commons. [5]

Mayo Fuster Morell proposed a definition of digital commons as "information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources". [3]

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives explicitly aims to "creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation" and actively promotes extending Creative Commons Licenses. [6]

Modern examples

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that provides many free copyright licenses with which contributors to the digital commons can license their work. Creative Commons is focused on the expansion of flexible copyright. For example, popular image sharing sites like Flickr and Pixabay, provide access to hundreds of millions of Creative Commons licensed images, freely available within the digital commons. [7]

Creators of content in the digital commons can choose the type of Creative Commons license to apply to their works, which specifies the types of rights available to other users. Typically, Creative Commons licenses are used to restrict the work to non-commercial use. [7]

Wikis

Wikis are a huge contribution to the digital commons, serving information while allowing members of the community to create and edit content. Through wikis, knowledge can be pooled and compiled, generating a wealth of information from which the community can draw.

Public software repositories

Following in the spirit of the Free Software movement, public software repositories are a system in which communities can work together on open-source software projects, typically through version control systems such as Git and Subversion. Public software repositories allow for individuals to make contributions to the same project, allowing the project to grow bigger than the sum of its parts. A popular platform hosting public and open source software repositories is GitHub.

City Top Level Domains

Top Level Domains or TLDs are Internet resources that facilitate finding the numbered computers on the Internet. The largest and most familiar TLD is .com. Beginning in 2012, ICANN, the California not-for-profit controlling access to the Domain Name System, began issuing names to cities. More than 30 cities applied for their TLDs, with .paris, .london, .nyc, .tokyo having been issued as of May 2015. A detailing of some commons names within the .nyc TLD includes neighborhood names, voter related names, and civic names. [8]

Precious Plastic

Precious Plastic is an open source project which promotes recycling of plastic through the use of hardware and business models which are available for free under Creative Commons license. [9] It collaboratively designs and publishes designs, codes, source materials and business models which can be used by any person or group to start a plastic recycling project of their own. [9] The online platform also consists of an online shop where hardware and recycled plastic products can be bought. As of January 2020, more than 80,000 people from around the world are working on some type of Precious Plastic project. [10]

Digital Commons as a policy

In October 2020 the European Commission [11] adopted its new Open Source Software Strategy 2020–2023. [12] The main goal of the strategy being the possibility to achieve European wide digital sovereignty.

It has been recognized that open source impacts the digital autonomy of Europe and it is likely that open source can give Europe a chance to create and maintain its own, independent digital approach and stay in control of its processes, its information, and its technology.

The digital strategy makes it clear that ‘collaborative working methods will be the norm within the Commission’s IT community to foster the sharing of code, data and solutions’. The principal working methods encouraged by this open-source strategy are open, inclusive and co-creative. Wherever it makes sense to do so, the Commission will share the source code of its future IT projects.

For publication of these projects, the European Union public licence (EUPL) will be preferred. The Commission will focus these efforts on an EU-centric digital government code repository (for ex. one in Estonia [13] ) In addition, the developers will be free to make occasional contributions to closely related open-source projects. The principles and actions of the new open-source strategy will make it easier to obtain permission to share code with the outside world.

Open data

Both definitions of Open Data and Commons revolve around the concept of shared resources with a low barrier to access. Open Data usually is linked to data produced by the government and make available to public but it can come from many sources like science, non-profit organizations and society in general. [14]

Open-source agriculture

Open-source agriculture emerges as a technology-oriented social movement. It aligns itself with other technology- and product-oriented movements, which seek to create alternative technological practices and artifacts. Examples of such movements range from the Luddite movement of the nineteenth century, which opposed profit-driven technologies, to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s, advocating for human-centered, small-scale, affordable, and environmentally friendly technology with local autonomy. Additionally, the organic food movement promoting alternative agricultural methods and the open-source software and hardware movement opposing proprietary software and hardware production have contributed to the legacy on which open-source agriculture now builds. [15]

Open-source agriculture follows the principles of open-source software development, facilitating the sharing of agricultural knowledge, practices, and data within the farming community. By encouraging collaboration and transparency, this movement aims to enhance innovation and efficiency in farming practices. Farmers can freely access, modify, and redistribute information, empowering them with customizable agricultural technologies and solutions suited to their unique contexts. [16] By adopting open-source principles, open-source agriculture strives to foster sustainability and resilience in the agricultural sector while challenging traditional proprietary approaches. Through its inclusive approach to agricultural innovation, the movement seeks to create a more equitable and sustainable future for farmers and communities worldwide. [17]

Issues

Opportunity of digital commons

The usage of digital commons has led to the disruption of industries that benefited from publishing (authors and publishers) while providing potential to other industries. Many wikis help to pass knowledge to be used in a productive manner. [18] They also have increased opportunities in education, healthcare, manufacturing, governance, finance, science, etc.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a great example of opportunities that digital commons bring, by bringing the opportunity to access high quality education to many people. Mayo Clinic is another example of spreading the medical knowledge to public availability. Nowadays most scientific journals have an online presence as well.

Gender imbalance in digital commons

The traditional under-representation of women and the lack of gender diversity in the field of STEM and in the programmer culture is also present in digital commons-based initiatives like open science [19] and open-source-software projects like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap. [20] Also smaller initiatives, like hackerspaces, makerspaces or fab labs are characterized by a considerable gender gap among their participants. [21]

There are different initiatives trying to face these challenges and bridging this gap by providing and creating empowering spaces where women and non-binary persons can experiment, exchange and learn with and from each other. Feminist hackerspaces were founded as a reaction to women's experiences of sexism, harassment and misogyny shown by the brogrammer culture in hackerspaces. Besides closing the gender gap among participants and creating safe spaces for female and non-binary persons, some projects additionally want to visualize the under-representation and lack of gender-related topics in the movements and in the outcome of their work. The collective Geochicas for example is engaged in the OpenStreetMap community looking on maps through a feminist lens and visualize data linked to gender and feminism. One project launched during 2016 and 2017 aimed to map cancer clinics and feminicides in Nicaragua. [22] In the same years Geochicas created visibility campaigns on Twitter under the hashtag "#MujeresMapeandoElMundo" [23] and the “International Survey on Gender Representation”. [24] In 2018 they created a virtual map by analyzing data from OpenStreetMap to rise awareness of the lack of representation of women's names on the streets of cities in Latin America and Spain. [25]

Tragedy of digital commons

Based on the tragedy of the commons and digital divide, Gian Maria Greco and Luciano Floridi [26] have described the "tragedy of digital commons". As with the tragedy of the commons, the problem of the tragedy of the digital commons lies in the population and arises on two ways:

  1. the average user of the information technology (infosphere) behaves in the way Hardin's herdsmen behave by exploiting common resources until they no longer can recover, meaning that users do not pay attention to the consequences of their behaviour (for example, by overloading of the traffic by wanting to access the webpage as quick as possible).
  2. the pollution of the infosphere, i.e., the indiscriminate and improper usage of the technology and digital resources and overproduction of data. This brings excess information that leads to corruption of communication and information overload. An example of this is spam, which takes up to 45% of email traffic.

The tragedy of the digital commons also considers other artificial agents, like worms, that can self-replicate and spread within computer systems leading to digital pollution.

See also

Related Research Articles

Openness is an overarching concept that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-design movement</span> Movement for product development with publicly shared designs

The open-design movement involves the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information. This includes the making of both free and open-source software (FOSS) as well as open-source hardware. The process is generally facilitated by the Internet and often performed without monetary compensation. The goals and philosophy of the movement are identical to that of the open-source movement, but are implemented for the development of physical products rather than software. Open design is a form of co-creation, where the final product is designed by the users, rather than an external stakeholder such as a private company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source hardware</span> Hardware from the open-design movement

Open-source hardware consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movement and apply a like concept to a variety of components. It is sometimes, thus, referred to as FOSH. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned so that others can make it – coupling it closely to the maker movement. Hardware design, in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released under free/libre terms. The original sharer gains feedback and potentially improvements on the design from the FOSH community. There is now significant evidence that such sharing can drive a high return on investment for the scientific community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-based projects generally have less rigid hierarchical structures than those under more traditional business models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michel Bauwens</span> Belgian activist

Michel Bauwens is a Belgian theorist in the emerging field of peer-to-peer (P2P), a writer, and a conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. Bauwens founded the P2P Foundation, a global organization of researchers working in open collaboration in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of essays, including his thesis The Political Economy of Peer Production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commons</span> Shared resources

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-culture movement</span> Social movement promoting the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others

The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.

Peer production is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the labor of many people is coordinated towards a shared outcome.

Connexions, later known as OpenStax CNX was a global repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The open source platform was provided and maintained by OpenStax, which is based at Rice University. The collection was available free of charge, can be remixed and edited, and was available for download in various digital formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free content</span> Nonrestrictive creative work

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limitations on usage, modification and distribution. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hackerspace</span> Community organization

A hackerspace is a community-operated, often "not for profit", workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, science, digital art, or electronic art, can meet, socialize, and collaborate. Hackerspaces are comparable to other community-operated spaces with similar aims and mechanisms such as Fab Lab, men's sheds, and commercial "for-profit" companies.

The term "knowledge commons" refers to information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet. What distinguishes a knowledge commons from a commons of shared physical resources is that digital resources are non-subtractible; that is, multiple users can access the same digital resources with no effect on their quantity or quality.

Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) is appropriate technology developed through the principles of the open-design movement. Appropriate technology is technology designed with special consideration for the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic aspects of the community it is intended for. Open design is public and licensed to allow it to be used, modified, and distributed freely.

A free license or open license is a license that allows copyrighted work to be reused, modified, and redistributed. These uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or other Intellectual property (IP) laws. The term broadly covers free content licenses and open-source licenses, also known as free software licenses.

Distributed manufacturing also known as distributed production, cloud producing, distributed digital manufacturing, and local manufacturing is a form of decentralized manufacturing practiced by enterprises using a network of geographically dispersed manufacturing facilities that are coordinated using information technology. It can also refer to local manufacture via the historic cottage industry model, or manufacturing that takes place in the homes of consumers.

Open manufacturing, also known as open production, maker mamanufacturing or material peer production and with the slogan "Design Global, Manufacture Local" is a new model of socioeconomic production in which physical objects are produced in an open, collaborative and distributed manner and based on open design and open-source principles.

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science is a non-profit organization that facilitates collaborative, open source environmental research in a model known as Community Science. It supports communities facing environmental justice issues in a do it yourself approach to environmental monitoring and advocacy. Public Lab grew out of a grassroots effort to take aerial photographs of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Since then, they have launched a range of projects, including an open source spectrometer, multi-spectral camera, and low-cost microscope.

Cosmopolitan localism or Cosmolocalism is a social innovation approach to community development that seeks to link local and global communities through resilient infrastructures that bring production and consumption closer together, building on distributed systems. The concept of cosmopolitan localism was pioneered by Wolfgang Sachs, a scholar in the field of environment, development, and globalization. Sachs is known as one of the many followers of Ivan Illich and his work has influenced the green and ecological movements. Contrary to glocalisation, cosmolocalism moves from locality to universality, acknowledging the local as the locus of social co-existence and emphasizing the potential of global networking beyond capitalist market rules.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open source</span> Source code made freely available

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open source appropriate technology, and open source drug discovery.

References

  1. ↑ Stalder, Felix. Digital Commons: A dictionary entry. http://felix.openflows.com/node/137. 22 April 2010.
  2. ↑ Bauwens, Michel, Kostakis, Vasilis, and Alex Pazaitis. 2019. Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. London: University of Westminster Press
  3. 1 2 Fuster Morell, M. (2010, p. 5). Dissertation: Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons. http://hdl.handle.net/1814/14709
  4. ↑ Bollier, David. Viral Spiral. How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. New York, London, New Press http://www.learcenter.org/pdf/ViralSpiral.pdf Archived 2018-10-04 at the Wayback Machine , 2008
  5. ↑ Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer. CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2006
  6. ↑ "P2P Foundation:About – P2P Foundation".
  7. 1 2 Walljasper, Jay. All That We Share: How to save the Economy, the Environment, the Internet, Democracy, Our Communities, and Everything Else That Belongs to All of Us. New York: New, 2010.
  8. ↑ "Archived copy". www.coactivate.org. Archived from the original on 11 April 2019. Retrieved 12 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  9. 1 2 "Precious Plastic is Open Source". preciousplastic.com. Archived from the original on 2020-04-15. Retrieved 2020-01-10.
  10. ↑ "Precious Plastic Global Community". preciousplastic.com. Retrieved 2020-01-10.
  11. ↑ "European Commission | Choose your language | Choisir une langue | Wählen Sie eine Sprache". ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 2020-12-26.
  12. ↑ "Open Source Software Strategy 2020 - 2023" (PDF). European Commission. 2020.
  13. ↑ "Estonia creates a public code repository for e-governance solutions". e-Estonia. 2019-04-30. Retrieved 2020-12-26.
  14. ↑ van Loenen, Bastiaan; Vancauwenberghe, Glenn; Crompvoets, Joep; Dalla Corte, Lorenzo (2018), van Loenen, Bastiaan; Vancauwenberghe, Glenn; Crompvoets, Joep (eds.), Open Data Exposed, Information Technology and Law Series, The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, pp. 1–10, doi:10.1007/978-94-6265-261-3_1, ISBN   978-94-6265-261-3 , retrieved 2022-01-10
  15. ↑ Kostakis, Vasilis; Niaros, Vasilis; Giotitsas, Chris (2023-06-30). "Beyond global versus local: illuminating a cosmolocal framework for convivial technology development". Sustainability Science. 18 (5): 2309–2322. Bibcode:2023SuSc...18.2309K. doi: 10.1007/s11625-023-01378-1 . ISSN   1937-0709. S2CID   259749096.
  16. ↑ Kostakis, Vasilis; Niaros, Vasilis; Giotitsas, Chris (2023-06-30). "Beyond global versus local: illuminating a cosmolocal framework for convivial technology development". Sustainability Science. 18 (5): 2309–2322. Bibcode:2023SuSc...18.2309K. doi: 10.1007/s11625-023-01378-1 . ISSN   1937-0709. S2CID   259749096.
  17. ↑ Kostakis, Vasilis; Niaros, Vasilis; Giotitsas, Chris (2023-06-30). "Beyond global versus local: illuminating a cosmolocal framework for convivial technology development". Sustainability Science. 18 (5): 2309–2322. Bibcode:2023SuSc...18.2309K. doi: 10.1007/s11625-023-01378-1 . ISSN   1937-0709. S2CID   259749096.
  18. ↑ Thompson, Neil; Hanley, Douglas (2018-02-13). "Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence From a Randomized Control Trial". Rochester, NY. SSRN   3039505.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  19. ↑ González-Véliz, Constanza; Campo, Susana de Andrés del (2023-11-29). "Comunes digitales, ciberfeminismo y ciencia abierta: estrategias para la igualdad de género en el entorno digital". Hipertext.net (in Spanish) (27): 67–79. doi: 10.31009/hipertext.net.2023.i27.07 . ISSN   1695-5498.
  20. ↑ Nafus, D. (2012). "“Patches don’t have gender”: What is not open in open source software" New Media and Society, 14(4), 669–683. Retrieved April 22, 2020
  21. ↑ Keune, A. et al.(2019). "Recognition in makerspaces: Supporting opportunities for women to “make” a STEM career" Computers in Human Behavior, 99, 368–380. Retrieved April 22, 2020
  22. ↑ Yang, S. (March 8, 2019). ""Geochicas, la colectiva geo-sorora" Revista Emancipa Retrieved April 27, 2020
  23. ↑ GeochicasOSM (2019). "Mujeres, tecnología libre e información geográfica voluntaria" Retrieved April 26, 2020
  24. ↑ Geochicas "" Retrieved April 27, 2020
  25. ↑ Moloney, A. (March 8, 2020). "'Visible women': Feminist mappers bridge data gap in urban design"
  26. ↑ Greco, Gian Maria; Floridi, Luciano (2004-06-01). "The tragedy of the digital commons". Ethics and Information Technology. 6 (2): 73–81. doi:10.1007/s10676-004-2895-2. ISSN   1572-8439. S2CID   5990776.
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