Cultural Commons in the Digital Ecosystem

2The Ostromian Approach to the Knowledge Commons

Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009, for her analysis of the economic governance of the original institutional forms of common land resources. We pointed out in the introduction that this work, which began in the 1960s at UCLA and continued until her death in 2012, focused almost exclusively on the governance of certain types of natural resources (fisheries, forests, pastures, etc.). When James Boyle invited her to the Duke symposium in 2003, she was given the opportunity to extend her reflection to the field of intangible resources (information, culture, knowledge). Two major publications followed, both written in collaboration with Charlotte Hess¹ (Hess and Ostrom 2003, 2007).

These various writings do not constitute a finalized and completed theory on the knowledge commons. Rather, they consecrate the creation of a research program on this theme that they consider fundamental. In this perspective, they lay down some essential milestones, at a theoretical and methodological level, to apprehend, from an empirical point of view, the study of the knowledge commons in specific contexts. This notion has much broader outlines than that of the cultural commons, which is only one of their manifestations. In the book on the knowledge commons that they have edited, Hess and Ostrom (2007) devote a significant part of their reflections to the question of open archives as a possible illustration ...