Contributing in commons - A governance hybrid
An approach to the governance of digital infrastructure has a number of obvious traditions that offer a framing of the challenge, and a less-familiar tradition, which we’re making central here.
An approach to the governance of digital infrastructure has a number of obvious traditions that offer a framing of the challenge:
Free-libre peer-to-peer production of code - classic FLOSS governance
Workers coops, consumer coops, multistakeholder coops - classic coop governance
‘Roots’ movement organisations, citizens’ assemblies, rank-&-file labour-movement organisations, workers’ councils - Assemblies
And a less-familiar tradition, which we’re making central here:
Full-range commoning - care work, articulation work, contribution
Various pages in this section remain incomplete at this stage. But here is a 15min video which sketches the four models of governance, to be considered in that section: Governance & contribution in commons and here are the slides. These can be used as a basic reference for this whole section.
Play the video (a BBB room recording) in Firefox or Chrome on a laptop or desktop.
Rather than something organised by ‘rules’, or as a matter of ‘decision making’ detached from everyday enactment of life and work, here we’re approaching governance as a matter contributing, practically and directly (by doing work of one kind or another), to the always-ongoing shaping of practice in commons, in all of its domains. Adopting principles and protocols, and mobilising them to frame practice, is important stuff (not the same as 'following rules'). So is making commitments - of materials, of labour, of the heart - that turn out to be strategic, with regard to the way in which an infrastructure for many, highly plural, distributed practices gets configured, and how mobilising of that infrastructure is to be facilitated and encouraged (not the same as 'decision making').
All four traditions above offer principles and protocols, and aesthetics of making commitments. But some kind of new and non-obvious hybrid is called for in the realm of digital infrastructure. ‘We’ (our species) hasn’t done this before, it’s (b)leading-edge.
In following topics we map the four traditions on to a basic schema of commoning, as follows:
We consider pros and cons of each model, and hunt for protocols that might be adopted for a commons of digital infrastructure.
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