Governing Knowledge Commons

Over the last decade or more, there has been a detectable and growing dissatisfaction among students with the status quo in the way the society works. Students have witnessed terrorism, long-term war, a great recession, the Occupy movement, effects of climate change and worse projections to come, and most recently, a global pandemic with a great impact on the economy. Many students are looking for models of hope and alternatives to the status quo on how society at local, regional and global levels might operate to collectively address problems. In this course, we will review historical and contemporary commons cases. [Note: Some of you might ask: “What exactly are commons”? This will be a question we will examine throughout the course, but I include three different definitions or descriptions in the box on the next page.] We will explore how these forms of social organization might be used to change the way we humans interact. Central to these discussions will be learning methods for studying commons governance, called Institutional Analysis, and a focal activity in the course will be a project where we study the governance and management of one or more active commons cases. Our overall goal is to study and investigate both successful and unsuccessful cases, and get inspired

The Use of the Institutional Grammar 1.0 for Institutional Analysis: A Literature Review

Since Crawford and Ostrom proposed the Institutional Grammar (IG), a conceptual tool for breaking down and organizing institutional statements, a burgeoning literature has used it to study institutions contained in single documents and to conduct comparative institutional analysis across multiple countries and time periods. Moreover, rapid advances in text analysis and computational methods are creating new analytic opportunities to study rules, norms and strategies by leveraging the IG syntax. At this stage, it is important to assess the existing literature to understand how the IG has supported institutional analysis across a variety of contexts, including commons governance. Based on a corpus of 48 empirical articles published between 2010 and 2021, we explore how analysts have operationalized institutional statements using the IG. We also synthesize the IG-based metrics and theoretical concepts developed in these articles to illustrate the contributions of IG for measurement of challenging concepts such as polycentricity, discretion, and compliance, among others. Our findings indicate that the IG is a flexible and adaptable tool for institutional analysis, especially for making empirical contributions from text-based data, and it holds promise toward building a potentially new emerging subfield we call Computational Institutional Analysis

World Librarians: A Peer-to-Peer Commons for Closing the Global Digital Divide

INTRODUCTION An estimated 53% of the world’s population do not have Internet access. As a consequence, they lack information capital that could be key to bettering their lives. In this practice article, we introduce a sociotechnical system called “World Librarians.” This system, facilitated by a knowledge commons, provides educators, librarians, students, and medical professionals in remote Internet-poor areas of Malawi with access to digital content that they request.OBJECTIVE We describe the social and technical methods by which a team of educators, librarians, students, and information technology specialists in information-privileged environments share educational content to information-disadvantaged communities. METHODS After briefly discussing key foundational components and partnerships, we explain the mechanics of the sociotechnical system. We follow this with two proof-of-concept cases where offline requesters in remote school and library contexts in rural Malawi are assisted by an online librarian searcher team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. RESULTS The proof of concept cases demonstrate that the relatively low-cost sociotechnical system accomplishes the goal of sharing open access educational content in remote areas with limited or no access to networked information. Moreover, the cases demonstrate that the content shared can be content global southerners offline want and need, rather than information global northerners think they should have. CONCLUSIONS The World Librarians system is ready to be scaled and replicated at other institutions with ready access to high-speed networked information. The authors welcome contact from readers who might be interested in establishing their library as a new “searcher node” in the growing World Librarians network

Cui Bono: Do Open Source Software Incubator Policies and Procedures Benefit the Projects or the Incubator?

Open source software (OSS), a form of Digital or Knowledge Commons, underlies much of the technology that we use in our daily lives. The existence and continuation of OSS relies on the contribution of private resources – personal time, volunteer energy, and effort of numerous actors (e.g., software developers’ time as a common-pool resource) – to public goods, the benefits of which are enjoyed by everyone. Nonprofit organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) attempt to aid this process by providing various collective services to OSS projects, acting as a second-order actor in the production of the public good. To this end, the ASF Incubator has created policies – essentially rules or norms – that serve to protect its interests and, as they say, increase the sustainability of the projects. Each policy requires investment by ASF (in terms of money or the use of volunteer time) or an incubating project (in terms of taking project personnel time), the benefits of which can accrue to either party. Such policies may impose additional costs on incubating projects, leading to a decreased production of the OSS public good. Using the ASF Incubator policy documents, we construct a dataset that records who – ASF or an incubating project – bears the cost and who enjoys the benefit of each policy and procedure. We can code most policy statements as costing one party and benefiting one party. The distribution of costs and benefits according to party indicates whether the second-order actor is contributing to an increase in the public good and if they are doing so sustainably. Through a two-way ANOVA, we characterize the impact of ASF policies on the production of public goods (OSS). Being a part of ASF imposes some costs on projects, but these costs may make projects more sustainable. Our analysis shows that the distribution of costs and benefits is fairly symmetric between the ASF and incubating projects. Thus, the configuration of policies or the “institutional design” of the ASF could aid in producing the OSS public good by providing services that projects require

The Transformational Effect of Web 2.0 Technologies on Government

Web 2.0 technologies are now being deployed in government settings. For example, public agencies have used blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis and RSS feeds to coordinate work, and wikis to internally share expertise, and intelligence information. The potential for Web 2.0 tools create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create real transformative opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations, specific reporting structures and therefore usually delayed through the filter of the bureaucratic constraints. What the emergent application and popularity of Web 2.0 tools show is that there is an apparent need within government to create, distribute and collect information outside the given hierarchical information flow. Clearly, these most recent Internet technologies are creating dramatic changes in the way people at a peer-to-peer production level communicate and collaborate over the Internet. And these have potentially transformative implications for the way public sector organizations do work and communicate with each other and with citizens. But they also create potential difficulties and challenges that have their roots in the institutional contexts these technologies are or will be deployed within. In other words, it is not the technology that hinders us from transformation and innovation – it is the organizational and institutional hurdles that need to be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the transformative organizational, technological and informational challenges ahead.publishe

Collaborative Learning Spaces and Maker Courses

An open discussion on their effectiveness for promoting multidisciplinary collaboration and community engagement The Maker movement represents a logical extension or synthesis of current trends in education, including active learning, problem based learning, team-based learning, flipped classrooms, and community-service learning. A variety of on-going efforts to build cross-departmental, active learning environments for students at UMass Amherst will be presented. The objectives of this work include engaging students in applied research, building safe spaces for exploring diversity issues, facilitating multi-level peer-to-peer support structures, and promoting community engagement. Examples will include discussion of a variety of makerspace courses, departmental/University traditional Makerspaces, and a Town-Gown Makerspace. The opportunities as well as challenges of such activities for supporting student growth and educational effectiveness will be discussed with active involvement of the Plymouth State faculty strongly encouraged

World Librarians Panel: Community Over Commercialization

World Librarians is a registred student organization that connects learners around the world without reliable internet access to open educational resources. What sets World Librarians apart is their effort on delivering information that their global partners are requesting. The club has had a global impact, and continues to expand and refine their efforts. This panel will be focusing on the World Librarians history, processes, and impact. You\u27ll hear from UMass students, both past and present, as well as advisors Charlie Schweik and Theresa Dooley, about our workflows, the technology we use, and the potential for future collaborations across campus and throughout the world. Students who are interested in joining World Librarians should do so through Campus Pulse