GOVERNING KNOWLEDGE COMMONS CASE STUDY COLLECTIONS
Human interactions, in any group or social setting, rely on and generate shared knowledge and social understandings. These shared intellectual resources are just as important to the efficient operation of markets and organizations as are their shared legal and material infrastructures. Governing Corporate Knowledge Commons focuses on the formal and informal arrangements that govern the creation and community management of intellectual resources within and across organizational boundaries. It demonstrates how the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework can be fruitfully combined with existing theoretical work on firms and corporate governance found in economics, management, and sociology. The volume also proposes a new set of case studies, ranging from old industrial enterprises to modern venture capital, investor alliances, and decentralized autonomous organizations. Chapters explore the benefits of participatory approaches to the management of genomic or financial data, online gaming communities, and organic waste.
(Coming soon: read more about Governing Corporate Knowledge Commons)
Our natural environment constitutes a complex and dynamic global ecosystem that provides essential resources for well-being and survival. Yet the environment is also subject to unprecedented threats from human activities, such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, biodiversity decline, and the overexploitation of natural resources. This volume argues that such complex, multidimensional challenges demand equally complex, multi-dimensional solutions and calls for coordinated, multi-stakeholder action at all scales, including governments, civil society, the private sector, and individuals. To meet the moment effectively, such interventions require both scientific knowledge about how the environment functions and social and institutional knowledge about the actors involved in environmental governance and management. Chapters include case studies of environmental knowledge collection, management, and sharing to explore how data and knowledge sharing can inform effective, multi-stakeholder action to combat global threats to our environment.
(Coming soon: read more about The Environmental Knowledge Commons)
Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons delves into the complex issue of misinformation in our daily lives. The book synthesizes three scholarly traditions – everyday life, misinformation, and governing knowledge commons – to present 10 case studies of online and offline communities tackling diverse dilemmas regarding truth and information quality. The book highlights how communities manage issues of credibility, trust, and information quality continuously, to mitigate the impact of misinformation when possible. It also explores how social norms and intentional governance evolve to distinguish between problematic disinformation and little white lies. Through a coproduction of governance and (mis-)information, the book raises a set of ethical, economic, political, social, and technological questions that require systematic study and careful deliberation.
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The rise of ‘smart’ – or technologically advanced – cities has been well documented, while governance of such technology has remained unresolved. Integrating surveillance, AI, automation, and smart tech within basic infrastructure as well as public and private services and spaces raises a complex set of ethical, economic, political, social, and technological questions. The Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework provides a descriptive lens through which to structure case studies examining smart tech deployment and commons governance in different cities. This volume deepens our understanding of community governance institutions, the social dilemmas communities face, and the dynamic relationships between data, technology, and human lives. For students, professors, and practitioners of law and policy dealing with a wide variety of planning, design, and regulatory issues relating to cities, these case studies illustrate options to develop best practice.
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Governing Privacy in Knowledge Commons explores how privacy impacts knowledge production, community formation, and collaborative governance in diverse contexts, ranging from academia and IoT, to social media and mental health. Using nine new case studies and a meta-analysis of previous knowledge commons literature, the book integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons framework with Helen Nissenbaum’s Contextual Integrity framework. The multidisciplinary case studies show that personal information is often a key component of the resources created by knowledge commons. Moreover, even when it is not the focus of the commons, personal information governance may require community participation and boundaries. Taken together, the chapters illustrate the importance of exit and voice in constructing and sustaining knowledge commons through appropriate personal information flows. They also shed light on the shortcomings of current notice-and-consent style regulation of social media platforms.
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Knowledge commons facilitate voluntary private interactions in markets and societies. These shared pools of knowledge consist of intellectual and legal infrastructures that both enable and constrain private initiatives. This volume brings together theoretical and empirical approaches that develop and apply the Governing Knowledge Commons framework to the evolution of various kinds of shared knowledge structures that underpin exchanges of goods, services, and ideas. Chapters offer vivid and illuminating case studies that illustrate this conceptual framework. How did pooling scientific knowledge enable the Industrial Revolution? How do social networks underpin the credit system enabling the Agra footwear market? How did the market category Scotch whisky emerge and who has access to it? What is the potential of blockchain-ledgers as shared knowledge repositories? This volume demonstrates the importance of shared knowledge in modern society.
Read more about Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons
Governing Medical Knowledge Commons makes three claims: first, evidence matters to innovation policymaking; second, evidence shows that self-governing knowledge commons support effective innovation without prioritizing traditional intellectual property rights; and third, knowledge commons can succeed in the critical fields of medicine and health. The editors’ knowledge commons framework adapts Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking research on natural resource commons to the distinctive attributes of knowledge and information, providing a systematic means for accumulating evidence about how knowledge commons succeed. The editors’ previous volume, Governing Knowledge Commons, demonstrated the framework’s power through case studies in a diverse range of areas. Governing Medical Knowledge Commons provides fifteen new case studies of knowledge commons in which researchers, medical professionals, and patients generate, improve, and share innovations, offering readers a practical introduction to the knowledge commons framework and a synthesis of conclusions and lessons.
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“Knowledge commons” describes the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation, of information, science, knowledge, data, and other types of intellectual and cultural resources. It is the subject of enormous recent interest and enthusiasm with respect to policymaking about innovation, creative production, and intellectual property. Taking that enthusiasm as its starting point, Governing Knowledge Commons argues that policymaking should be based on evidence and a deeper understanding of what makes commons institutions work. It offers a systematic way to study knowledge commons, borrowing and building on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning research on natural resource commons. It proposes a framework for studying knowledge commons that is adapted to the unique attributes of knowledge and information, describing the framework in detail and explaining how to put it into context both with respect to commons research and with respect to innovation and information policy. Eleven detailed case studies apply and discuss the framework exploring knowledge commons across a wide variety of scientific and cultural domains.
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ABOUT THE GKC BOOK SERIES AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
We welcome proposals for new books in this series and expressions of interest in collaborating on GKC research projects. Contact any of the members of the GKC team for more information.
Additional, detailed information about the book series is available here.
KEY GKC JOURNAL ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
The character, uses, and evolution of the GKC research framework are described in these journal articles authored and co-authored by leaders of the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons team.
- 2009. Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, and Katherine J. Strandburg, “The University as Constructed Cultural Commons.” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy
- 2010. Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, and Katherine J. Strandburg, “Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment.” Cornell Law Review. That 2010 Cornell Law Review article anchored a special issue that also included the following short responses:
- 2010. Thrainn Eggertsson, “Mapping Social Technologies in the Cultural Commons.”
- 2010. Wendy J. Gordon, “Discipline and Nourish: On Constructing Commons.”
- 2010. Gregg P. Macey, “Cooperative Institutions in Cultural Commons.”
- 2010. Robert P. Merges, “Individual Creators in the Cultural Commons.”
- 2010. Elinor Ostrom, “The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework and the Commons.”
- 2010. Lawrence Solum, “Questioning Cultural Commons.”
- 2010. Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, and Katherine J. Strandburg, “Reply: The Complexity of Commons.”
- 2013. Brett M. Frischmann, “Two Enduring Lessons from Elinor Ostrom,” Journal of Institutional Economics
- 2022. Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, and Katherine Strandburg, “Too Much of a Good Thing? A Governing Knowledge Commons Review of Abundance in Context.” Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
- 2023. Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo and Brett M. Frischmann, “A Proposal for Principled Decision-Making,” in Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons
- 2024. Michael J. Madison, “Knowledge Commons Past, Present, and Future.” Lewis & Clark Law Review
- 2025. Ebubechukwu E. Uba and Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, “Governing knowledge commons in information science,” Information Research
- 2026. Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, and Katherine J. Strandburg, “Governing the Digital Commons.” Proceedings of the 59th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
RELATED BOOKS
These are produced by close collaborators of the GKC team.
The free exchange of microbial genetic information is an established public good, facilitating research on medicines, agriculture, and climate change. However, over the past quarter-century, access to genetic resources has been hindered by intellectual property claims from developed countries under the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Agreement (1994) and by claims of sovereign rights from developing countries under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (1992). In this volume, the authors examine the scientific community’s responses to these obstacles and advise policymakers on how to harness provisions of the Nagoya Protocol (2010) that allow multilateral measures to support research.
Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation, and the future of the Internet. Each of these involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time. This book pays much needed attention to understanding how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value, with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property to Internet policy. Economics has become the methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The book explores a set of questions: what drives the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant management problems that recur across many different fields and many different resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.
The use of open-source software (OSS)—readable software source code that can be copied, modified, and distributed freely—has expanded dramatically in recent years. The number of OSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net (the largest hosting Web site for OSS), for example, grew from just over 100,000 in 2006 to more than 250,000 at the beginning of 2011. But why are some projects successful—that is, able to produce usable software and sustain ongoing development over time—while others are abandoned? In this book, the product of the first large-scale empirical study to look at social, technical, and institutional aspects of OSS, Charles Schweik and Robert English examine factors that lead to success in OSS projects and work toward a better understanding of Internet-based collaboration.
For information about additional related scholarship, knowledge case studies, a bibliography of GKC research, and more, see the Resources page.
OSTROM AND KNOWLEDGE COMMONS
Elinor Ostrom, with her colleague Charlotte Hess, published an edited collection of essays in 2006 that in some ways serves as an intellectual bridge between decades of empirical work on biophysical commons and then-nascent interest in the dynamics of digital information networks and resources.
Knowledge in digital form offers unprecedented access to information through the Internet but at the same time is subject to ever-greater restrictions through intellectual property legislation, overpatenting, licensing, overpricing, and lack of preservation. Looking at knowledge as a commons—as a shared resource—allows us to understand both its limitless possibilities and what threatens it. In Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, experts from a range of disciplines discuss the knowledge commons in the digital era—how to conceptualize it, protect it, and build it. Contributors consider the concept of the commons historically and offer an analytical framework for understanding knowledge as a shared social-ecological system. They look at ways to guard against enclosure of the knowledge commons, considering, among other topics, the role of research libraries, the advantages of making scholarly material available outside the academy, and the problem of disappearing Web pages. They discuss the role of intellectual property in a new knowledge commons, the open access movement (including possible funding models for scholarly publications), the development of associational commons, the application of a free/open source framework to scientific knowledge, and the effect on scholarly communication of collaborative communities within academia, and offer a case study of EconPort, an open access, open source digital library for students and researchers in microeconomics. The essays clarify critical issues that arise within these new types of commons—and offer guideposts for future theory and practice.
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