Knowledge Commons

Characteristics

Natalie Pang:

"Three salient characteristics of the knowledge commons can be highlighted:

1) resources that are shared and freely available,

2) the generation and use of co-created knowledge, and

3) spaces or facilities that allow for both personal and public discussions. (thesis)

Typology

By Content Function

Natalie Pang on the Manifestations of the knowledge commons:

"The knowledge commons are constantly changing and mutating. Existing examples are in a constant state of evolution, and new examples continually appear. It is thus not possible to describe all the areas where the concept of the knowledge commons has been manifested. However a selection of key categories of the knowledge commons would need to include the following.

The Information Commons

The information commons is a term loosely used to refer to resources on the Internet (Bollier, 2004; Beagle, 1999; Hess, 2000) and redesigned or newly designed libraries (Halbert, 1999; Beagle, 1999). It emphasises the free and equitable use of information resources.

In the literature there are two main connotations for the term information commons, namely:

– the online environment itself, in which digital services can be integrated and distributed effectively at marginal cost across distances. – the infusion of technological services in libraries, and used to ‘denote a new type of physical facility specifically designed to organise workspace and service delivery around the integrated digital environment’ (Beagle, 1999, p 82).

In both cases, the purpose is to provide possibilities for access and contribution to resources, including framework implications such as information architecture design, the design of spaces and facilities, and so on.

The Learning Commons

Another widespread term is the learning commons, increasingly used by libraries. In the learning commons, library services, resources, technologies, and physical spaces are integrated towards the core purpose of learning. The focus of the learning commons is on cognitive enrichment through integrated access to information resources in various media free to the user at the point of use (MacWhinnie, 2003). Quite often found in academic libraries, the learning commons brings together various functions of the institution under one roof: such as technological support, language and learning services, and of course, the library holdings.

Other scholarly commons

Other applications of the commons include the Cultural Commons, Science Commons (Levine, 2003), the Academic/Scholarly Commons (Hellstrom, 2003; Bollier, 2004), or the Student Commons (Butin, 2000); aimed at engaging participants in creating dialogue around arts, cultural, scientific, anthropological or wider academic or campus issues. In addition to providing access to onsite topical information resources, such examples of the knowledge commons, all follow the collaborative principles and open content licensing frameworks associated with commons models.

The Creative Commons

Last but certainly not least in this selective listing of contexts in which the knowledge commons concept is manifested, is the Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons is not a place – it is an open content licensing framework which seeks to offer a range of access possibilities between demand for full copyrighted-based payment for every use of information resources and totally unrestricted free use."

Authorative vs. Allocative Knowledge Commons resources

Natalie Pang:

It may be discerned there are two types of resources within the knowledge commons.

A commons exists because ‘common knowledge’ of a community recognises its existence, and some level of rules – however informal and fragmentary – are implied by this recognition. The rules may be as minimal as an understanding of what falls within or outside the physical or virtual boundary of the commons.

Giddens (1984, p. 33) calls such rules ‘resources’, and sees a distinction between ‘authoritative’ and ‘allocative’ resources. An authoritative resource consists in the community consensus that a particular social patterning (otherwise called a social institution) can and should exist – in other words the basic or enabling rule(s). Giddens ‘allocative’ resource consists in the rules that social institutions follow in order to share finite goods among people.

Giddens defined both authoritative and allocative resources as follows (Giddens, 1984, p. 373):

Authoritative resources: Non-material resources involved in the generation of power, deriving from the capability of harnessing the activities of human beings; authoritative resources result from the domination of some actors over others.

Allocative resources: Material resources involved in the generation of power, including the natural environment and physical artefacts; allocative resources derive from human dominion over nature."

Discussion

Paul B. Hartzog on Openness in the Knowledge Commons

"Human knowledge is stored in the distributed network of individual human minds, and a repository of human knowledge needs to be stored in a distributed fashion as well, a "knowledge commons," if you will.

What would the Knowledge Commons look like? Fairly simple, as it turns out. Imagine a peer-to-peer network in which everyone could contribute pieces of knowledge, and those pieces would be immediately spliced into bits and replicated throughout the system. Like SETI@home and other distributed computing initiatives, everyone would share the load, so to speak, for the Knowledge Commons.

Importantly, such a system would be open on two fronts:

1. Open access: the system would be open to both input and output. In other words, anyone could put information into the system, and anyone could obtain information out of the system.

2. Open development: since the core protocol would be open, changes to it would be community-driven. Furthermore, anyone could develop a client application (or a web application) that would connect to the Knowledge Commons." (http://onthecommons.org/node/979)

Ownership and the knowledge commons

Natalie Pang:

"Bollier viewed the commons as collectively owned by society. In a paper he affirmed his argument, defining the commons as ‘various physical resources, social institutions and intangible cultural traditions that we, the members of a society, collectively own’ (Bollier, 2005, p. 4).

Though not disagreeing that some resources in the commons can be collectively owned, Levine (2003) maintained that many resources in the commons can be seen as unowned by anyone. He gave several examples of how the ‘unowned commons’ can work: such as the Internet, books and music where copyrights have long expired, and software generated under the General Public License. In these examples, the openness and extent to which they are shared freely contribute to the perceived absence of ownership."

More Information

The quotes above from Natalie Pang are from:

PhD Thesis: THE KNOWLEDGE COMMONS IN VICTORIA AND SINGAPORE: AN EXPLORATION OF COMMUNITY ROLES IN THE SHAPING OF CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS. By Natalie Pang. For the Faculty of Information Technology Monash University September 2008