David Bollier beat me to it with this post. He’s one of the authors, so he deserves the honor. My copy of this important new book just arrived.
Bollier writes:
Two leading scholars on the commons, Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, have just published a great anthology of essays, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (MIT Press). The book brings together some varied perspectives on knowledge as a “shared social-ecological system.†I highly recommend it.
The idea that knowledge is incubated and maintained through social communities is hardly revolutionary, of course. But the rise of the Internet has suddenly made it more imperative to understand the structure and norms of “knowledge communities,” which can vary widely. This book helps sort through this variety with chapters on open access scholarly publishing (Peter Suber), research libraries (Wendy Pradt Lougee), science as a commons (James Boyle), open source software (Charles Schweik), preserving the knowledge commons (Donald J. Waters) and civic engagement and knowledge commons (Peter Levine), among others. I am pleased to be among this illustrious company with a chapter on “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm.â€
Hess and Ostrom have been pioneers in this area for some time, beginning with a paper they presented at the 2001 Conference on the Public Domain at Duke Law School. Charlotte Hess is the Director of the Digital Library of the Commons at Indiana University. The Digital Library is well-worth checking out as a gateway to thousands of articles on various commons. Elinor Ostrom may be best known for her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons, and for the many commons-related projects of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Ostrom is widely regarded as the dean of commons scholarship, a field which she helped create.
Now that the World Wide Web is about twelve years old, it’s about time that more academics began to study knowledge as an artifact of the commons. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons should go a long way toward validating this idea while providing lots of useful analysis, theorizing and references.