Defining consumers needs some work here.
“Using” community resources — chat / forum discussions / issue queue
Filing issues of any kind, from bugs to feature requests.
Documentation is part of the commons. Also no boundaries on it, but in part “solves” for preserving /scaling maintainer time. So contributions to documentation is also something valuable.
“Merely” using the code isn’t consumption.
Where the boundaries of this system are is the hardest to define.
Yes the boundaries is a good shout, and number 1 of Ostroms 8 Design principles.
During our call we whiteboarded a simple example, trying to tie together our current understanding of Ostrom’s framework (only having read half the book!) to FOSS. It was a good exercise and I think I have a much more sophisticated view. I would like to draft that up here maybe tomorrow to be the starting point for another round of critique.
Highlighting a bunch of interesting books and articles from this:
An overview of the 8 Rules:
Another book with a cool-sounding title
And another book with an impressive subtitle
Just an FYI but I am only halfway through Ch4, and I think Philipp and Steven are not caught up either. So I am shooting for a Ch4 commentary by the next Friday.
No pressure all! We do this because we enjoy it, not because we have to.
A lot of over-extraction:
:shakes-fist:In order to come to an agreement to work together, they needed a shared picture:
Given the accuracy of the information and its ease of access, each pumper knows what everyone else is doing, and each knows that his or her own groundwater extractions will be known by all others. Thus, the information available to the parties closely approximates “common knowledge,”
There are some interesting nodes to rule systems that I thought I would bring up since there are a lot of programmers here in this convo:
is the concept of “deontic operators” used in PL theory?
In trying to apply an Ostrom framework for OSS, we quickly identified that the resource is not the “code” itself. We identified “hours” as the limited resource that needs management. As we worked through an example on our Halfway Call, we came to some more conclusions. I thought I would try and capture it below. This is all WIP of course, as we read the book, but take a look at this as a way to think through it:
Maybe that term is too general… but it basically comes down to the labour needed to maintain and grow a project.
Formerly we said “hours” but I think this could be more expanded to include things that make those hours more “productive”, for example supplying resources like infratstructure, more experienced talent (which makes those hours more efficient), or even automation.
Work includes things like:
How does each actor produce/contribute to the Work? How does this change over the lifecycle of a project?
At first the founding developer might start with just dedicating evening and weekend hours. They might be able to secure income in order to dedicate more of thier time. As the project grows in popularity, a firm might take over the stewardship, dedicating financial resources, talent, infrastructure, etc to the project.
Key point here is that the “work” of an Open Source project is created and consumed by the same types of actors in the ecosystem (even if it is not all the actors in an ecosystem)
Everybody seems to be slowing down a bit. Well, here is my overview of Chapter 5:
This chapter covers a number CPR examples that are not doing well. Each case study is full of detail, and at the very end she puts them all in a matrix alongside some of the previous examples with her design principles (and some more criteria) thusly:
Some of my takeaways from the chapter included:
Sorry Chad, last few weeks have been a bit crazy. Just started with chapter 4.
This final chapter of the book sums everything up and has lots of highlightable sections. Mainly though it wraps up its academic argument against the “current” way economists use rational choice models to explain to policymakers how to deal with CPR problems. Ostrom is pushing for a new “framework for analyzing problems of institutional choice.” In a slight to economists, she notes:
CPR situations are rarely as powerful in driving participants … toward efficiency as are competitive markets. … following short term profit maximization in response to the market price for a resource unit may, in a CPR environment, be exactly the strategy that will destroy the CPR, leaving everyone worse off. Nonmonetized relationships may be of importance.
She criticizes idealized models which control for a single variable as too narrow for policymaking, and argues that a more flexible framework that takes into account situational variables is the better path. The book shows how the situational variables variable are best read by those that are closest to the CPR. This does not mean government can’t be involved: “Forms of public instrumentalities were also used … but none of the success cases involved direct regulation by a centralized authority.” Stable political systems, and the California judicial infrastructure are examples.
In the final pages she sums up:
The intellectual trap in relying entirely on models to provide the foundation for policy analysis is that scholars then presume that they are omniscient observers able to comprehend the essentials of how complex, dynamic systems work by creating stylized descriptions of some aspects of those systems.
Her conclusion:
First, the individuals using CPRs are viewed as if they are capable of short-term maximization, but not of long-term reflection about joint strategies to improve joint outcomes. Second, these individuals are viewed as if they are in a trap and cannot get out without some external authority imposing a solution. Third, the institutions that individuals may have established are ignored or rejected as inefficient, without examining how these institutions may help them acquire information, reduce monitoring and enforcement costs, and equitably allocate appropriation rights and provision duties. Fourth, the solutions presented for “the” government to impose are themselves based on models of idealized markets or idealized states.
I think this quote she has is 
:
Most modern economic theory describes a world presided over by a government (not, significantly, by governments), and sees this world through the government’s eyes. The government is supposed to have the responsibility, the will and the power to restructure society in whatever way maximizes social welfare; like the US Cavalry in a good Western, the government stands ready to rush to the rescue whenever the market “fails”, and the economist’s job is to advise it on when and how to do so. Private individuals, in contrast, are credited with little or no ability to solve collective problems among themselves. This makes for a distorted view of some important economic and political issues. (Sugden 1986, p. 3)
Her dream expressed:
If this study does nothing more than shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve CPR problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation, it will have accomplished one major purpose.
Most of the chapter she runs through the various elements of her 8 Principles including things like developing rules for use, information transparency, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and also how to change/develop a system.
She also points out that this is for smaller communities of CPRs, which is a key point. Size matters under her framework. This is also why she talks about “nesting” to achieve scale:
But once the smaller units are organized, the marginal cost of building on that organizational base is substantially less than the cost of starting with no prior base.
eg.
Eventually the system that evolved in Gal Oya was four layers deep.
and the statement:
A theory of self-organization and self-governance of smaller units within larger political systems must overtly take the activities of surrounding political systems into account
After recently reading Seeing like a State and Two Cheers for Anarchism I was very happy to see this kind of bottom-up, federated approach.
One section I found interesting is where she discussed how when you are developing your CPR community, you can learn the “wrong lessons”. In California:
Instead of applying the lesson by starting with small incremental changes at the basin level before attempting to build interbasin institutions, they went to the interbasin level first, before designing intrabasin institutions. What worked as an incremental bottom-up strategy at the basin level did not work when attempted at a regional level.
There are no shortcuts to building a healthy CPR community. You have to start with the people closest, slowly iterate, maintain good relationships and information flows, be in a relatively stable political environment, and just figure out the rules and the system for yourselves.
One last takeaway for me: “Crisis” politics. Noting that “[i]ndividuals weight, for example, potential losses more heavily than potential gains” she says:
The propensity of political leaders to discuss CPR problems in terms of “crises” is far more understandable once one takes into account that individuals weight perceived harms more heavily than perceived benefits of the same quantity.
Which makes me think a lot about how the climate crisis is positioned. Maybe we need to take her advice and talk more about the positive gains we could reap if society moved towards more green interactions. Solarpunk, anybody?
