Governing the Commons

Brian Marick's podcast with transcript on Governing the Commons, with an invitation for software code base stewards to work with the Ostrom Center. page , mastodon , post

[…] Which gave me an idea.

Indiana University contains a building called the “Ostrom Workshop”. “Workshop” here doesn’t mean something like a half-day workshop at a conference. It’s intended to evoke “a room, area, or small establishment where manual or light industrial work is done.” That is, a place that facilitates the study – and the putting into practice – of commons-like ideas.

⇒ Erik Nordman

My dream contribution would be this: 1. One or more software teams want to apply Ostrom’s principles to codebases. (There’s also a nested commons angle, which I’ll omit here.)

2. They get to talk to your people. A team will have many questions about specifics that you may well have answers for.

3. By keeping in touch with what’s happening in the team(s), you get ethnographic-ish, publishable data in a new domain that’s of considerable economic importance.

4. My people get popularizations of what worked and what didn’t. The goal is to make it easier for teams to get started. I’m able to spend some of our family money to make it happen. Probably more grant money than my wife got for a lot of her work. (4:39)