Common, Community, Allmende

Volker Grassmuck

The panelists were mainly debating the topic of public knowledge in the age of information society. Volker Grassmuck opened the debate with his lecture about three major points: the traditional form of commons, the form of commons we can experience nowadays and where to go from here. According to Volker we had communal property all through history until the end of the middle ages. For example the of utilization of wasteland could not be made just by one person but by a group of people. This consequently lead to a collective ownership by this group (cf. sociologist Max Weber). However this community property was differente to public property because it still excluded many other people. As a result we can see a boundary to the outside but openness to the inside of a given community.

Later on the upcoming money economy made possible the transfer of immobile goods such as land. The shared property enabled a reduction of cost for the individual while maximizing the individual benefit, however limited by the scarcity of natural resources. Volker Grassmuck quotes Garrett Hardin on this about the impossibility of a natural regulation of this process in an "unmanaged world". (cf. Garrett Hardin "The Tragedy of the Commons").

The answer to overuse of (natural) resources is regulation, managed by local communities. (cf. Elinor Ostrom "Governing the Commons") So, according to Grassmuck the concept of commons is not dead. There is still hope but among others things analytical tools need to be developed.

Volker Grassmuck went on to discuss the idea of commons in the age of infosociety. Knowledge (etc.) is not a scarce resource. Non-exclusive, non-rivalous use is possible. That is, if you abstract from the material carrier of information. Knowledge, too, was a common good up until the middle ages, according to Volker. Now, although information itself is not a scarce resource, there is something else that is scarce: the attention of both creators and public (if different).

So before companies went on to adopt "open source" as a new paradigm everything was fine. Nowadays motivation has also become a scarce resource in free software development.

New tools need to be developed in the area of content creation. Slashdot etc. could be a good model to start. Peer reviewing, community rating need to be evaluated and developed further. (cf. Scoop) We need to get rid of a central institution which itself is an accumulation of power (e.g. sourceforge.net). We need to get distributed. Free software development is much more interesting in these terms than for example Napster. Originally we had a symmetry of production and consumption on the net. Now it has become an asymmetry: content creation tools cost lots of money, consumer "tools" (viewers) are free. This is dangerous.

Shuddabrata Sengupta

Shuddabrata Sengupta showed the project "Sarai" which is formed after an idea of a medieval form of getting together. An important question is: how accessible is the community to people outside it.

Cybercafes in New Delhi can be seen as a kind of digital common. There's a very high density of cybercafes there and very few people own a computer themselves. So this digital common is a kind of interface between the physical and the virtual world.

Sengupta went on to show some differences between free software and cultural commons. In free software development a motivation to do development is to improve software. This concept of improvement cannot be applied to culture. So what else can be a motivation for common cultural property? The idea of sharing is essential here. Shuddabrata Sengupta together with colleagues devised the "concise lexicon of/ for the digital commons" and also created a piece of collaborative software called "opus" which is essentially an open publishing framework. The idea behind the project is that anyone can do with the content whatever they want, but the changed content is supposed to come back to the original site. There is a totally different concept behind this and the known idea of sharing: it is more like rescension, the idea of having different versions of the same cultural artifact (see the lexicon for that

Sengupta read some other concepts from the lexicon like <code (how to reveal the source code in cultural products?), gift, liminal and meme.

Reinhold Grether

After that it was Reinhold Grether's turn. He started with a short remark about the lack of women on the podium and invited women in the audience to come up instead of him. This found no interest so he went on himself.

He came up with the idea that the World Trade Center assault brought a "crack to the imperial psyche" and went on to talk about the three layers of networking namely the tech layer, the visual or desktop layer and the soc(ial) layer. These three layers have to be brought together to bring down the new Empire which itself tries to setup an new worldwide arena (Hollywood etc.) (comparison to Roman empire etc.).

After the three lectures there was a short discussion. The audience addressed the question to Shuddabrata Sengupta if there wasn't an inherent danger in the culture of gift: "A gift can also be a poison". Sengupta agreed with this to some extent and saw a certain danger with this: "You can also be overwhelmed by generosity.

Links:
Tragedy of the Commons
Book Review: Governing the Commons
Sarai project

transcript: ofrommel  
 
LINKS


 
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