My background is in the study of governance of natural resources and the study of socio-ecological systems, mostly in the context of forested landscapes, and evaluation of the impacts of human behavior on these landscapes using geographic information systems and remote sensing. I also have a background in institutional analysis (the study of rules and governance), collective-action, and self-governing communities working together in “commons” or “commoning-type” situations. Prior to graduate school I was a professional programmer for IBM.
In 1999, just after joining UMass, I first heard the phrase “open source software” (OSS), and I realized that the theory and empirical work on self-governing “commons” communities in natural resources could help to understand this new area of Internet-based self-governing teams working to develop software commons. Moreover, I realized that the innovations made in the use of copyright law – sometimes called “Copyleft” in the OSS community – had potentially huge implications for how humanity worked on any problem (not just software) harnessed by the communication and collaboration tools that reside on the Internet. I pleased to say that my sense back in the turn of the 21st century was correct. Arguably the world now runs on OSS and the principles underlying these software teams are now being replicated in other areas including collaborative writing (think Wikipedia), open source hardware (e.g., Arduino microcontrollers), open data in science, open access publishing, and more. These latter examples are sometimes referred to as “Knowledge Commons.”
The phrase that is most often used to describe generically what we are seeing in these areas is called “Commons-based Peer Production” (CBPP). It is a concept that remains central to what I think about, research, teach, and it now even dominates my activities in university and professional service. Still, very few know the CBPP term and its importance – and dominance — in everyday life. Yet, in an era where our students are depressed at the state of the world, tired of the negative externalities of an economic-centered world, concerned about their future as a result of climate change, and at a loss as to how to change the dominant systems, we are quietly witnessing a resurgence in public interest around commoning more generally and CBPP more specifically as a practice. As I teach students about these ideas and demonstrate it to them through the outreach we do together in the World Librarians program (see below), I find students becoming more inspired and re-energized and coming to the realization that there is great hope in human collective-action, driven by the innovations that their generation, and the one prior, are doing though harnessing the Internet and CBPP. I remind them that the Internet is an infant; really a mere thirty years old. We humans are just learning how to use it for local-to-global collective action, and how forms of self-governing communities that cross all sectors (private, public and nonprofit) and cross all scales of governance (local, state, national and international) can leverage this platform for social good.