Much has been written about libraries, scientific research and cultural commons, but my concern is more directly about the challenge of preparing to live in a foreseeable future that is quite unlike the present. Even in the current pandemic, people have been turning back to activities that are closer to basic survival. How much more relevant those will become, if we have to face a partial collapse of our society or our economy; or if, to avoid collapse, we follow policies of degrowth.
We might want learn to grow food on our own plot of land, without high technology or artificial pesticides and fertilisers. The old virtues of “make do and mend”1 may be very appropriate, with clothes, buildings, tools and equipment. For climate migrants or displaced people, learning a new language might be vital. Some skills are useful now, as well as in the future: learning a new programming language, or how to make videos, for example.
Wikipedia is often cited as a knowledge commons, and in several senses it is. However, the main policies (Neutral point of view; No original research; and Verifiability) together mean that many useful learning materials cannot be published there, and no one is allowed to structure learning materials in a way that is particularly helpful for any group of learners.
The rest of the web errs in the other direction. For sure, anything and everything can be, and usually is, published, often in video form. There are whole courses presented as MOOCs. However, many questions are left open. Many free materials either go along with watching advertisements, and/or giving away one's personal details to some unknown marketing operation. There is rarely any easy way to find other people, either to learn together with, or to give advice.
People in the past, including the many commons studied by Ostrom and others, arose out of – and have been embedded within – cultures where literacy was the exception rather than the rule. In these cultures, knowledge would have been held in human memory (including embodied memory) and passed on, shared, or transmitted by example or by word of mouth – face-to-face showing and telling. Indigenous peoples have stored vast amounts of knowledge that way. In our mechanised and tightly interwoven economy, this kind of knowledge transmission and storage has been squeezed out of mainstream learning and training, and remains, on the one hand, in ‘private’ life, and on the other hand, in highly specialised jobs, where some of the know-how is picked up directly from colleagues. If we wish to learn ancient skills, we have to learn them in different ways. We may need to do this sooner rather than later.
So what is needed, and in particular what is needed that is different from what is common at present, so that people can find and learn the information and knowledge that they need, in order to thrive both in the present uncertain world and in a future world that seems less certain every year?
It hardly needs spelling out that this needs to be a commons. One alternative to the commons – the (currently dominant) market economy – leads to a price being set on everything that can potentially be sold. As knowledge is naturally abundant, this requires the creation of artificial scarcity of knowledge, and restrictive intellectual property rights, which in turn make collaboration far more difficult than it needs to be. With the other, state-managed alternative, the kind of centralised control that often comes with that is very unlikely to meet the needs of a highly diverse body of learning commoners. State provided education, in most countries, has little flexibility, and cannot even adapt to the needs of diverse children. So it is unlikely to offer a solution as people grow to become more diverse with age and experience.
As I've said that people are highly diverse, it might seem foolish of me to suggest what could work for everyone. Nevertheless I will try, but only at the highest level, based on what I can imagine I would really want. (This is one of the areas which I would most appreciate additional views, to broaden and deepen what I have here into a stronger collaborative position.) What I imagine would serve me (and maybe others) well would be:
I hope I've explained enough why educational institutions are not likely to provide these opportunities, and why we need some kind of knowledge commons to provide the learning resources needed for living in the uncertain future to which we are in transition. How can we approach this, given the inadequacy of what is currently available? Three points keep coming back to me, which seem to be some of the key barriers to realising what we want and need. I would appreciate collaborating with other researchers and practitioners who have also considered these questions, to make this list more solid and comprehensive. My three, which I will expand on below, are:
Information and communication technologies should be fit for the purpose of enabling people to collaborate on creation and maintenance of these kinds of knowledge commons. But my explorations suggest that there are several things that are less than ideal. Here I will focus on two that seem vital and urgent.
The context is that there are already many initiatives that have set out to document useful knowledge for living, of the kind that I have pointed to earlier.2 Several wikis do this, and I won't even start to count the many blogs and YouTube channels, even just for organic horticulture and permaculture. So there is plenty of information out there, but it is not so easy to find, and almost impossible to know that you've found the best resource for you. There could, it seems, always either be materials that you haven't seen, or that may be more at your level.
And this is hardly surprising. Blogs and video channels were not designed with cross-linking in mind. Wikis nearly all have a simple facility to link to another wiki page, and to flag a page that needs to be created, but the functionality for cross-linking between different sites is very limited. In effect, people have to insert links by hand, just as they have to from any other web site, including video description pages. So how could we expect the different initiatives to be well enough cross linked to be able to skip across from one to another easily? Added to this is the commercialisation of platforms, that disincentivises sending people to other sites on the web.
One step towards improving this would be to help with back-linking. When one site has gone to the trouble of making a link between their page and yours, we could at least make it easier to link back, semi-automatically. When someone clicks on a link to our site, I want our system to record where that came from; then if it's from a domain in the network we want to collaborate with, we either approve it for our backlinks – or perhaps not: not all links are helpful. I've seen some blog sites do something similar, but not wikis.
Having links to navigate between all the different related sites would help a little bit to find different sites, but what if none of the sites are tailored to your needs, or the needs of any specific group? Then cross-linking by itself is not enough. We really need a way to bring together related materials from different site, and rebuild them for particular audiences, or learning groups, or communities of practice. And of course this can be done, with a lot of effort, cutting and pasting from different pages and resources and painstakingly building a new site.
What if there were an easier way to do it, particularly for large amounts of information? This could greatly help, particularly when there is agreement between different parties to hand over responsibility for a particular area of knowledge commons. But wiki interoperability is currently not good. To make a start, a standard format for export and import would be helpful. Then, any platform could work towards exporting and importing information in that format.
Having set that as a desirable goal, how are people going to reach it? The ‘official’ standardization processes are slow, and only partially open. It is a real challenge to get agreement and stakeholder ‘buy-in’ to any proposed standard, and it is hard to devise a standard which both meets a genuine need, and is easy enough to implement for software developers.3
The human social challenges of building and maintaining complex knowledge commons are much harder than the purely technical challenges. It's a highly complex problem in an extremely complex system. My colleagues and I at Cetis learned this many years ago in the context of educational technology.
Many factors motivate people, including individualism, competitiveness, exclusivity, language, privilege, and identity. Yes, these could help people to come together to build knowledge commons, but they can also be epistemic bubbles or even echo chambers that prevent understanding and cooperation.4
My own PhD research many years ago confirmed what others had found, that for complex tasks in complex systems, people tend to devise their own ways of approaching those tasks. Organising knowledge is most often a genuinely complex task.
So, to build a living knowledge commons, people need to develop their capacity for collaboration, both within teams to collect and maintain living bodies of knowledge, and across teams to agree useful dividing lines. This needs people to engage in generative dialogue – in the sense of David Bohm or William Isaacs or Otto Scharmer.5
A shift in attitude would help, from "I know a lot and I'm going to put it out there" to "I have an interesting idea and I'm going to find out how it fits into the bigger picture" to "this greater goal is a really worthwhile – how do all of us best contribute to it?"
Key to all of this is how an individual can fit best into a collective. By ‘best’ I mean a situation where the individual has a clear sense that this is where they are ‘meant to be’; this is where they can ‘be well’ in the broadest sense; and equally where the collective has people doing everything that is needed and then co-creating more. In other words, where individual and collective are both thriving.
This is NOT the traditional ‘HR’ approach, of categorising people's skills and slotting them into the boxes of pre-arranged roles. Nor is it letting every individual do what they first think they want to do. That would mean people competing for high status roles, and no one doing the less attractive jobs.
Some people might assume it's just finding the right algorithm, given individual preferences and collective needs. Can we test this? I believe it will never give the optimal solution.
Rather, fitting individuals really well into a collective needs the emergent power of the whole collective's ‘right-brain’ intuition, and this is what generative dialogue leads towards. This is my central hypothesis here.
Existing knowledge commons are limited because people don't have these abilities. They are either stuck in hierarchical control, like Wikipedia, or in uncoordinated individualism, like video platforms, blogs, and many privately run wikis.
When people actually develop these skills, it generates trust; it is intrisically rewarding; and it helps people recognise and step up to their ‘true calling’. This motivates people to take collective responsibility for great teamwork: in this case, good quality, well-maintained living knowledge commons in specific areas. And, by the way, creating and maintaining the wiki interoperability standards.
To conclude, here's a question for us all. Like individuals fitting in collectives, can we imagine fitting collectives into an ecosystem?
Let's develop inter-group dialogue. How else can we enable the living negotiation and re-negotiation around which collectives do what in a living knowledge commons?
↑ 1 “Make do and mend” was a phrase used in WW2 Britain, and The Imperial War Museum have a highly relevant page, no doubt often used as a learning resource.
↑ 2 One of the oldest may be the excellent Appropedia, which has been going for 15 years. The P2P Foundation Wiki (to which I have contributed extensively) is only slightly younger. And there are newer ones like Communities for Future. All three run on MediaWiki software. Other resources don't run on wikis as such. Lowimpact is a Wordpress site, and this fits the modus operandi of Lowimpact, which is to have the information contributed by experts, but actually written in house style by dedicated people, as pages, not blog entries. Then there are many, many private blogs out there.
↑ 3 The author has been directly involved in several standards projects, and these comments are from first hand experience of the ones that were less successful!
↑ 4 The work of C. Thi Nguyen on echo chambers and epistemic bubbles was popularised on Aeon, but can be seen in more detail at PhilPapers, also at ResearchGate.
↑ 5 David Bohm: On Dialogue; William Isaacs: Dialogue and the art of thinking together; C. Otto Scharmer: Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges
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