In this post I’d like to sketch some rough ideas and identify a few sources for anyone who might be interested.

The corpus of Ostrom’s extensive and detailed empirical and theoretical work demonstrates that, contrary to popular impressions, it is possible to successfully manage a common-pool resource (eg, forests, fisheries). The aspect of this work that I find most wonderful is that there is no one model for success. It is complicated and messy. This brings me joy because it feels so very real. As Ostrom says at two different points in her lecture, “there are no panaceas.”

Ostrom identifies 8 design principles important for successful management of common-pool resources:

• Boundaries of users & resource are clear
• Congruence between benefits & costs
• Users had procedures for making own rules
• Regular monitoring of users and resource condition
• Graduated sanctions
• Conflict resolution mechanisms
• Minimal recognition of rights by Government
• Nested enterprises

These are terse abbreviations for robust thoughts that I cannot explore in detail here. But I will attempt a short summary. My apologies to Ostrom if the summary unknowingly misrepresents her ideas.

Open access to a common-pool resource results in overuse (ie, the tragedy of the commons). People act in their own short-term interests and neglect or remain unaware of a sustainable longer-term in which everyone is better off. Achieving a more optimal outcome requires cooperation based on considerable communication among members. Building trust is an essential component and this requires time to invent and modify many diverse sets of rules. These rules cannot be generalized beyond the specific social and ecological context. Members must have the ability to create rules, monitor adherence to the rules, and determine appropriate sanctions when rules are not met. This requires considerable transparency. Everyone must be able to see what others are doing and to judge their individual and collective impact on the resource itself. Successfully managed common-pool resources often have multiple institutions in a nested or polycentric organization that may be quite complex, including various public and/or private units. Regardless, members play a core role in cobbling together something that works given constraints such as culture, politics, finances, time, and personal strengths.

No one solution fits all. Success is local, situational, social, nested, transparent, and institutionally complex. Basically it’s a mess. Wonderfully real. And, I think, a message. There is no panacea.

How does this relate to the future of learning? At first blush, it seems at best tangential. Afterall, learning is not a common-pool resource in the same manner that forests are. If someone cuts down a swath of forest, those trees are gone. This is not true when someone learns; knowledge still exists for others to use after the learning. Indeed, knowledge may even be reinforced the more it is used.

What happens, however, if we look obliquely at learning? Bear with me here for a moment.

It’s quite ordinary for two friends to share some portion of their combined knowledge. To take a simple example, consider two children in grade 3. One excels in mathematics but is not so good in reading. The other excels in reading but is not so good in math. They each help the other according to their strengths.

Now imagine this situation on a larger scale. With three friends the cooperation remains intact and the opportunities for sharing increase.

At some point in the scaling, however, the communication and trust built on friendship gets diluted because there are just too many people, some of whom may only be acquaintances or even strangers. So the natural ability to share common knowledge at small scale becomes more difficult at larger scale.

But suppose this larger group of children had some way to communicate, to build trust, to determine rules for sharing, to gain experience cooperating with others. Might they not create a successful institutional arrangement for sharing knowledge? It seems possible.

Now imagine maximum scaling so that everyone in the world was included. We’d be sharing a vast knowledge commons both within and across local and situationally specific micro-institutions concocted from whatever arrangements created the conditions to thrive.

Is that possible? To me it seems too obscure to consider seriously at this time and at that scale.

There does seem merit in further work on learning commons at the level of real people in real contexts. Ostrom’s design principles will provide guidance but are unlikely to transfer cleanly. It’ll be messy. You’ve got to love that.

Elinor Ostrom. 2009. “Governing a Commons from a Citizen’s Perspective” (pdf). In Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons, ed. Silke Helfrich. Berlin: oekem Verlag.

Paul B. Hartzog, Sam Rose, and Richard C. Adler. 01-February-2010. Resource Sharing – Grounding the 21st Century Economy. The Forward Foundation.

A Commons Manifesto:
Various authors. 2009. Strengthen the Commons – Now! (pdf).