ABSTRACT

This chapter explains the emergence of the new knowledge commons and examines the potential contribution of Elinor Ostrom perspectives, developed in collaboration with Hess, to understanding its emergence in terms of motivation, property rights, regulation and creativity. The growth of cyberspace has provided a platform for a new economic model based on mass participation that moves production beyond the confines of the market and the state. The law professor Michael Heller has introduced the notion of tragedy of the anticommons, fearing that enclosure of a resource can lead to underuse. In 1984 Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland, brought together the relevant tools necessary and coined the phrase World Wide Web. An Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework might be used to develop design rules for promoting a robust knowledge commons, in a similar fashion to the way it has been used to investigate traditional forms of common pool property.