Where are the commons?

In our work at the Action Mill, we talk about “taking action in the commons” as an important component of social change work. But what do we mean by the “commons”? The commons are where we interact with other people. Public spaces are only commons when there are people interacting in them – people who don’t already agree with each other, or aren’t already part of a group.

We believe actions should move people, and in order to move people, an action must engage them. That means rethinking where and how we take action. Instead of fighting for a permit to wave our signs in a “free speech zone” at Bush’s second inaugural, we organized 5,000 people to infiltrate the crowd watching his parade and undermined his authority with a simple act of defiance. Instead of rallying outside of Congress to call for an end to the Iraq war, we brought veterans and citizens together inside the House and Senate chambers for an action that challenged our political leaders directly. When we set up public hotlines to allow people in Iran and the US to talk to each other, we place them where the crowds are and invite anyone to pick up a phone and talk.

Traditionally, commons are a collectively owned space with resources that are shared openly, such as a parcel of land with grass used by many herders. The commons we’re talking about is a different one, but it overlaps the first in one aspect: the commons of ideas. While their animals graze on the commons, herders trade information and ideas about weather, markets, and other interests. This overlap is seen in many commons – the market for goods is often a marketplace for ideas, a gathering point for people who share one common interest but may differ on politics, religion, knowledge or philosophy.

These ideas (or more specifically the exchange of ideas) are a kind of resource, but unlike grass in a field, ideas are a theoretically limitless resource. Additionally, grass will grow just as well on public or private land, but ideas thrive in public space where their interaction with other ideas serve to strengthen them and create new ideas. Ideas held in private, whether by secret or copyright, tend to wither and stagnate. This is an essential difference – the tragedy of the resource commons describes the diminishing returns when multiple individuals acting in their own self-interest use up a shared resource, but those same conditions cause the triumph of the commons of ideas, where adding people and ideas causes increasing returns. 

If commonly held grazing land is the traditional example of a resource commons, Speakers' Corner in London serves as a good example of a commons of ideas. Speakers' Corner, at the northeast corner of Hyde Park, is a space where anyone can come and speak on the topic of their choice. (There are limits to this free speech zone – profanity is not allowed, for example.) Crowds will gather around interesting speakers, and debates often break out. Of course, the proper functioning of this commons requires that everyone does not speak at once – it is the interaction and exchange of ideas that strengthen them. People use cues - visual and audible - to regulate their interactions with others and make a commons of ideas function efficiently. These cues and norms are the naturally evolved regulatory system that makes a commons of ideas work.

But what happens when you apply these models to something other than public parks? The internet is often assumed to be a commons, both of resources and ideas. But both types of commons function differently in this space. As technology progresses, the price of duplicating and distributing digital resources approaches zero,* making the internet a resource commons with near limitless potential. But the interaction of ideas in an online world is another story. Without the cues used to regulate conversation, the exchange of ideas is extremely difficult – so much so that we wind up building walled off cities where people with similar ideas can interact without having to try to exchange ideas with people who disagree with them. The online commons of ideas fails to function without these interactions, and instead these walled cities tend to create conditions that cause the stagnation of ideas.

When people with different ideas do interact online, the results are often tragic. Flame wars, a term originally coined in Usenet discussion groups, are a good example of the destructive consequences of the interaction of dissimilar ideas in an arena without working checks and balances. New cues and older ones adapted to work on the internet have developed (”netiquette”) but so far they pale in comparison to the cues available during in-person discussions and debates. And these cues often develop within walled cities, so that they break down when applied to conversations that involve a larger population. The phenomenon of the “Eternal September” is an extreme example of this. For many years, Usenet was the domain of college students and faculty. Within this semi-closed community, certain norms developed, and each September these norms needed to be reaffirmed as a new crop of students joined the discussion groups. These norms could be maintained despite this influx of new users because old users far outnumbered new ones. But when AOL began giving access to Usenet, the sudden appearance of tens of thousands of users overwhelmed this system of orienting new users to the norms in small groups once a year. Usenet forums were never the same.

To counteract the problems users face in online interactions, different forms of mediation have been developed. Discussion groups and forums where large numbers of people interact can be some of the least productive spaces online, which has led to restrictions on new users and moderated content. But these are both barriers to the commons that sap some of its strengths. The use of CAPTCHA systems to determine whether a user is a person rather than a bot has a similar, though less restricting effect: by slowing a user down slightly it allows for a moment of reflection before posting a new critique or idea. Gmail’s Goggles feature applies this idea to email — a user can elect to use a tool that delays the sending of any email between certain hours by requiring the user to solve several math problems.

As with real-world commons, there are many examples of online commons where ideas and resources overlap. Open source application development is one example, where groups of people come together and share resources (programming) to create something larger and more robust than would be possible in a closed group. These projects can create tools that dominate markets and outperform applications created in commercial (private) settings, but visiting the forums where the same programmers who produce these applications interact and trade ideas is often a frustrating experience, with debates sometimes devolving into personal and abusive interactions.

So how do we foster a working commons of ideas that is not dependent on our evolved system of cues and norms? First, we should not idealize the functioning of the commons of ideas in their current or historic forms – just putting people with different ideas in a park does not create the conditions for fruitful interactions.  This may give us some clues as to how people best utilize a commons of ideas. In our work with DS4SI, we have learned a lot about game theory and its application to this kind of problem. We find that setting up a system of simple norms (we call them rules in our internal discussions) can lead to unexpected behaviors. Our goal is to play with different rules to find a combination that causes a space to emerge that is inviting and promotes interaction between people. 

Questions:
What are good examples of current and historical commons?
How do these commons function?
What are the cues and norms that help commons function efficiently?
What are the natural or imposed mediators that help a commons function efficiently?
What are the differences and similarities between resource and idea commons?
What are the origins of netiquette? who championed these cues/norms? do they derive from established face-to-face conventions of civility?

Further reading:
onthecommons.org
www.speakerscornertrust.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers’_Corner

*The price of admission to the internet remains a serious issue, and the ways that we gain access are widely varied, making it even more complicated. This is true of any real-world commons as well – saying that anyone can speak in a public park implies that transportation costs are zero and that people can afford time off from work.