Introduction

This article focuses on collective and voluntary practices of online knowledge production, called by participants and researchers “digital knowledge commons”, or “communities of creation” [1]. The term “commons” borrows from the work of E. Ostrom [2], dedicated to the analysis of institutional structures of collective governance which allows to maintain the use of renewable but limited goods such as natural resources. The “commons” is here transposed to knowledge, produced online. The use of this term is not insignificant: it underlines a renewal in the capacity of individual, non-professional actors to engage in these projects and to produce, organize and manage collective actions of production, comparable in quality and volume to the productions of traditional organizations, universities or companies [3]. Wikipedia, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, has been able to produce encyclopedias in more than 50 languages, and, for the most widely used languages, with 10 to 40 times more articles available than in traditional encyclopedias, with comparable quality. But does the word commons used in digital commons mean the same thing as when used to means a classic commons? If not, why this analogy? If so, what do the knowledge commons and the classical commons studied by Ostrom have in common?

P. Dardot and C. Laval [5] defend the idea that these “new commons” are chosen communities (in the sense of Proudhon’s “commune” [6] and of the opposition that Tonnies [7] makes between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), which can be liberating and the basis of a political action of construction of the society beyond the State-Market duopoly [4], and that it is precisely their interest, even their “revolution”.

But it is difficult to understand whether these modern commons and the ancient commons share beyond a name, and perhaps similarities in the way their governance is organized, as emphasized by institutional economics [8], notably in E. Ostrom’s works on “traditional” commons and on their extension to knowledge commons [9,10]. As Laval himself points out (end of §7 of [11]), the “analogical gesture, which has found its scientific legitimacy in the work of economists, jurists and political scientists, the most famous of whom is without question Elinor Ostrom”, is not explained.

We will recall first what a classic commons is and why this definition does not a priori apply well to creative communities (part 2). In order to overcome this paradox, it is necessary to better define what “lies at the origin of what a ‘commons’ is: the qualification of things, the co-obligation between individuals, the formation of a collective” ([12], §6). In other words: the objectives and activities of the projects and its participants (part 3), in order to understand what is the rare and rival resource that is managed by these projects, and why we can indeed speak of a digital knowledge commons (part 4). We will then be able to ask the question of the specificity of the knowledge commons and the impact of digital on commons (part 5). In conclusion, we will emphasize that these coordination mechanisms, essentially virtual, or more precisely based on IT (information technologies), build the governance structure and the different roles, and thus the boundaries between those who are part of the group, and those who are excluded, in other words what the “community” is¹ in a community of creation.

The commons as the management by a small collective of a rare and rival resource

A classical commons is defined by: institutional arrangements (based on uses, customs, in addition to law), physical or material resources (e.g. software, technical monitoring devices), which allow the construction of exclusionary of access and rare or rival resource exploitation mechanisms [2]. The project is to have a sustainable exploitation of this resource, thus to manage collectively the withdrawals on the resource.

Being able to collectively manage a resource is remarkable, and this is what makes the commons attractive as an organizational model. Indeed, individual interest can go against collective interest. If a resource consumption level is defined within a group and distributed between the members of the group, and if everyone respects their allocation level, the consumption is sustainable. But even a small individual increase can have disastrous collective consequences. And it may be in one’s interest to default, because, at least in the short run, one earns more. This is illustrated by the prisoner’s dilemma, where, if everyone respects the rule, everyone wins, but if one is the only one not to respect it, one can win even more, to the detriment of others… If there are few “free-riders”, the impact on the others can be small, but if few respect the rule, everyone loses (Table 1).

Based on this, Olson [13] argued that it was extremely difficult for a collective to successfully manage a common resource, and that it was necessary for participants to be able to monitor each other, so that defection would be detected and punished so quickly that it was ineffective. Above all, he argued that the larger the group, the more tempting defection was, because individuals were less easily observed (it is costly to observe everyone and the impact of defection, which is smaller in relation to total consumption, is less easily detected).

What E. Ostrom has shown is that a small group was quite capable of organizing cooperation and regulation mechanisms. This is consistent with what Olson says, who calls these small groups “privileged” groups. Above all, she studied the fundamental principles of such collective regulation².

The majority of the population are simple “users”, who have the right to enjoy the existence of the resource (e.g. walking in a park, a forest), not to consume it (cutting wood). This is the privilege of the smaller group mentioned before, the “consumers”. To supervise the application of the rights, and to sanction, are additional rights, granted to only a sub-part of the consumers. The articulation of rights and the powers that certain individuals have to enforce them, or “bundles of rights” [14] (and duties), organize the governance of this group [15]. These powers are derived from the law (property rights, for example), from usage, or from the control of technologies (barriers, surveillance systems). Finally, as much as the public of users may have weakly defined and porous boundaries (anyone may be allowed to cross a natural park, or a stretch of sea), the consumers are specified. The “community” (in the etymological sense, the group that shares a thing) is therefore the group of people who has an interest in the thing, because they can both exploit it (consume the rare resource) and manage it. This group remains of small size.

At first sight, the community of creation does not fit this description: if we understand well why a physical resource must be preserved and perpetuated, it is less obvious for a piece of knowledge that has been “codified”, i.e. made explicit in a “code” transmissible because understood by others (a description realized in a written or oral speech, a computer code…) This piece can be shared without rivalry, and, with digital technology, at low cost. Non-exclusivity and non-rivalry define what economists call a “public good”, and with it a new difficulty: in classical economic theory, the users of the (public) good have no individual incentive to participate in the production of this good, and we find ourselves in another prisoner’s dilemma when no one is going to produce knowledge, waiting for the others to make the production effort. The consequence are the same: the resource is not sustainable.

The communities of creation’s success appears all the more remarkable: the largest projects coordinate hundreds (Linux) or even thousands of contributors (Wikipedia), who, moreover, are not necessarily identified, or only by a pseudonym, which can be changed. This, a priori, seems closer to Olson’s “latent” groups, very large groups where the defection of one does not affect the others enough to make them react.

If one has to admit their success, one does not see how these projects correspond to the classical definition of a commons: a group that would collectively organize the regulation of the consumption of a rare, rival resource. To do this, we must first dispel the myth of the “free rider”, who would wait for others to produce and make available pieces of knowledge in order to use them.

Contribution to knowledge production projects

Communities of creation are intended to organize the production (or, more precisely, what we have called the “codification”) of elements of knowledge articulated between them. The more the stock grows, the richer and more interesting it is for the users (more functionality for a software, more domains covered by an encyclopedia, more scientific knowledge disseminated). But as the work on the knowledge economy [16] has shown, this stock must constantly be updated, because needs, scientific knowledge, or technologies evolve. The production of new knowledge (what we will call the “flow”) must constantly improve, update, or simply maintain the “stock”. In the classical system of the knowledge economy, and of intellectual property law, a property right is given to the producers of the flow, who can control the access to the stock and are remunerated by charging for this access. It is because they anticipate that they will be able to draw remuneration from a toll on access to the stock that the producers invest in the production of the flow.

We can reformulate the communities of creation’s challenge by asking why contributors are willing to work to maintain the flow of knowledge without being paid for access. Research has shown, over the last fifteen years, that there are benefits to contributing to the production of the flow [17].

In software development projects, the intellectual challenge (solving a complex problem, comparing oneself to one’s peers) and the need to modify software to meet one’s own needs explain the contribution [18,19]. The motivations to contribute to Wikipedia are, in addition to the intellectual challenge, the access to peers to deepen one’s knowledge, or the possibility to see one’s productions exposed on such a popular platform [20,21]. Finally, in online forums, the access to expertise incites to ask questions. The use of a platform as a place to organize one’s knowledge (to build structured answers), in addition to the intellectual challenge, and, sometimes, the idea of being visible in an arena that is not without a link to a potential professional market (community of professional practices) explain why some people respond [22,23]. Finally, it seems that for the most active participants, and the most senior ones, especially those who are in charge of regulating contributions, the attachment to the project [23,24], and the social interactions they find there [25] are at the heart of the motivation to participate.

In other words, and to take up Deci and Ryan’s model [26], intrinsic motivations (to be efficient in these tasks, to do challenging things, and to be recognized by one’s peers) are enough to explain the contribution, even if the motivations differ according to the tasks. Regular contributors seem to have a particular profile [27,24], different from simple users, because they need specific skills (technical, in particular, but also in relation to the capacity to produce knowledge and to formalize it, to know the “codes” of the project, see [28] for free software, [27] for Wikipedia). But beyond that, there is also the interest, the pleasure of contributing, which we have recalled above and which is not shared by all simple users. If a project that is just starting out can have difficulties in attracting contributors, successful projects, on the contrary, have difficulties in managing contributors who propose content that is not aligned with the interest of the project, that does not respect its”rules”. One has to arbitrate between sometimes contradictory individual interests [29]. Thus, the history of Wikipedia is the history of a growth of rules, of criteria defining what is a good contribution [30]. But all communities of creation have systems to regulate contribution [31,28,32].

In summary, the problem is not so much the incentive to contribute as to contribute well. The free rider is not the one who does not contribute, but those who, by acting only in their own interest (trying to impose their vision of knowledge), harm the collective interest (to propose a coherent stock of knowledge). It is precisely this will to contribute that corresponds to the consumption of scarce resources and that must be regulated…

The commons of the communities of creation

Indeed, access to the writing of an article and to the exposure of one’s work, one’s ideas, and access to the peer group, to the interaction that produces learning, are two scarce and competing resources [17]. To make this explicit, we can use a famous expression from the platform economy: at any given moment, the peers’ available brain time is not extensible. In forums, questions need to be regulated so that experts can focus on the unanswered ones, often those that present the most important challenge. Similarly, a topic, an article name in Wikipedia, or a package, a software layout in Debian, are unique (there is only one article for the name “World War II”, even though more specialized articles may exist, only one Firefox package). Finally, a scientific journal only produces a certain number of articles per year, mainly because the resource “reviewers” is scarce. If one wants one’s contribution, responding to one’s vision of knowledge, to be taken into account, discussed and improved, one must have access to this unique resource. One must propose something new, or something better than what already exists within the framework of this project, of this community of creation. The example of scientific journals helps to illustrate that sometimes several communities of creation have the same goal and that therefore access to the rare resource can be more or less difficult… But also that the very success of a project, because it makes it more visible, makes the contribution to this community of creation more interesting and reinforces all the more the need for regulation of access to the rival resource. The regulation of access to these resources is indeed at the center of the functioning of these collectives, of the “governance structure that ensures the long-term reproduction of the resource and the community that governs it”, to use the words of B. Coriat [33]. From the point of view of the project, it is a question of regulating individual interests based on intrinsic motivations in order to make them accept its obligations, its collective rules [34].

To summarize, the activity in the production of a knowledge commons is the construction – the writing – of a shared common corpus (the stock) through negotiation, where each member tries to put forward his or her vision of the concepts and submits a codification of them (the contribution, the knowledge flow).

The users, defined by the fact that they have “the right to enjoy the non-subtractive benefits” [35] of the commons, are then those who access the knowledge stock. Guaranteeing its access may be costly or require regulations, for questions of congestion (it is necessary to finance its availability, the servers and Internet access), and several business models may be used to do so (advertising based, donation based). The consumers are those who have the right to participate in the production of the flow of knowledge, to access various rare resources (publication spaces, peer feedback). As in a classical commons, there are different types of “consumers” who have different powers over these resources. Here again, the powers come from the law (intellectual property rights, in particular), from usage, or from the control of digital technologies: the platform that manages contributions, thus the editing system (the MediaWiki software for Wikipedia, for example, the GitHub platform for many free software projects), but also from tools for monitoring contributors, such as algorithms for automatic analysis of contributions [36]. They build hierarchical roles (Table 2).

Table 2: Bundles of rights associated with the position (role), in the case of digital collective projects. Adapted from [17].

The knowledge commons do not therefore call into question the classic, Ostrom’s definition of the commons, often taken up by research [37,33,38], or by practitioners: “The commons, or simply the commons, are resources, managed collectively by a community, which establishes rules and governance with the aim of preserving and perpetuating these resources”³. Simply, regulation has shifted because consumption has shifted, from a right to take to a right to solicit (from a publication space, from a peer…) This shift, but also the specificity of the digital world, explain why the communities of creation have been able to overcome the difficulties of latent groups raised by Olson.

The digital spaces of knowledge contribution

It is not easier to initiate such projects than classical commons projects, for two reasons: their cumulative, incremental aspect [39], and the greater ease of reaching people who are very interested in the project, thanks to the Internet [40].

Each increment of Wikipedia, or of a forum (article, question-answer pair), each scientific article has a value in itself. There is no imperative to reach a certain level of achievement, as soon as the platform that allows the contribution exists, the project can be initiated. It is therefore not necessary to convince a certain number of contributors ex-ante, or to meet a certain sum, nor to wait for the realization to be completed (e.g. a bridge). The most interested ones start and, as the project grows, it gains interest from new contributors, generating an increasing return on adoption effect. The situation is a bit different for software, which requires a minimal level of functionality to be usable. But this suits the user-developers behind the FOSS projects, who are willing to collaborate to develop a new product, because it is better suited to their needs [41,42]. And, secondly, the creation of specialized exchange spaces on the Internet [40], favors the start of such communities. It is easier to reach a group of potential contributors who are interested in a platform project, as Linus Torvalds did when he initiated Linux and recruited contributors from a list in the Usenet forum. On the other hand, it may be difficult to convince new contributors beyond the core group of early adopters (ibid), who may have different preferences than other potential contributors [43]. There may also be competition between different similar projects on the objectives pursued (this is almost classic platform economics). If the project succeeds in attracting these first “adopters”, and still following the model of [39], it enters a phase of expansion, which will require setting up a regulatory organization. But the incremental and above all modular nature of the production also allows the general project to be segmented into different sub-projects (different articles, different portals, different software files, different discussion forums, etc.) A “participation architecture” [44] is built, which also facilitates the entry of new contributors [45], because they can concentrate on the part that interests them. The regulation is first done in these contribution spaces, as close as possible to the task ([46,47] in the case of Wikipedia, [48] in the case of free software). Discussing the task can lead to discussing the rules regulating the task, and thus the project, and advance one’s vision of the contribution, and of the project [49,50], to such an extent that the most invested contributors, notably the meta-contributors, spend much more time managing the project, negotiating and monitoring it than contributing knowledge [47,51]. Contributors also tend to specialize on tasks, roles that interest them and that lead to various positions in the project [19,52,53].

There is a “career” (in the sense [54]), in the contribution [49,23,1,24]: one must first prove oneself in the task of editing [55], which goes beyond the contribution of knowledge, but which includes the capacity to negotiate the co-construction of this knowledge with experienced participants, and in particular meta-contributors [49,56], before being able to take on control responsibilities, in other words, before having rights that go beyond the simple right to contribute.

The digital world seems to favor a posteriori regulation of the consumption of the rare resource because one must contribute in order to be able to access to the peers’ feedback, whereas in the classical commons, the individuals with the right to consume the resource are selected a priori. Neither the rules nor the spaces for negotiation are immediately perceived by the individuals [57,28], notably because there is not necessarily human support for the first contributions. Thanks to digital technology and the development of algorithmic tools for analyzing contributions and an infrastructure for managing collaboration [58,36], the monitoring of contributions and the coordination of the various sub-projects is highly automated. It is notably this that ensures coherence between all the sub-projects in a global project. It is therefore more difficult to achieve consumer status. But, on the other hand, rule-based regulation, managed more or less automatically by artificial intelligence tools (bots), offers the possibility of learning these rules, which are made explicit, and which can be tested several times (trial and error). It is thus possible to learn, and nobody is excluded a priori from this role. For this reason, online knowledge production can be more welcoming to the diversity of profiles than other classic commons, but at the cost of a greater effort to become a contributor, but also of more classical knowledge production projects, where status plays a big role in the right to produce (see the work on epistemic communities, notably: [59])

Conclusion: regulation and community

The governance of such projects is based on different hierarchical spaces, governed by different rules of operation, different conventions, which make it possible to regulate the different objectives of the project and of the sub-groups. We can speak of different “cities”, in the sense of the economy of worth [60]. The control and the selection of the contributions (of the “production” part of the project) are based on the principles of the industrial city (efficiency, science), thus according to their respect of the rules (of substance and form). The control is procedural [47], and the supervision panoptic, in the sense of Foucault [61], which is strongly favored by the digital which allows to develop automatic tools, creating an organization of control, in the sense of G. Deleuze [62]. This functioning is not very different from that of private platforms (for a study of the regulation in these platforms: [63]). The consumers (the contributors) who remain in the project are those who have made the individual effort to learn and integrate these uses, these rules, these norms of the project [34]. Nevertheless, control can always be challenged via discussion spaces, especially if the rule has been misapplied, or in the case of a rule conflict. But it is always up to the contributors to prove their good faith, to negotiate the rule within the project city. There are also coordination discussions on production tasks (of the authors of an article, of the contributors to a software program), which can also lead to more general discussions on the overall project, but not always [64,65], notably because the meta-contributors discuss the rules of the project among themselves, in spaces that are specific to them: Le Bistrot, for example, for the FrenchWikipédia, the discussion lists of the contributors in an open source software project), and which are not necessarily known to the simple contributors (ibid). These spaces are more or less open, in some projects only by invitation, but in all cases only those who have shown their capacity to contribute, and their interest in the project, who have accepted and are ready to defend the common interest, are listened to, or accepted. In other words, the roles of meta-contributor, of “policy-maker” as Ostrom would say, or of “commoners” [33] are granted by the actions of individuals, and are always contestable if one knows where the discussion spaces are, and in the discussion spaces of the project. These spaces are managed as what [60] name “cities of project”, whose aim is to propose ideas to develop the project, to make its rules evolve, and where creativity and the capacity to organize the collective through discussions are recognized. We are no longer in the control, the “power over” of Deleuze, but in the “power with”, as described by [66], based on the work of M. P. Follett [67]. This is a major difference with private platforms, whose owners alone decide the rules of operation. As explained by M. P. Follett, these “power with” activities develop feelings of belonging to the project and the group [23,24]. The participants in the city of project city thus form a “community”, i.e. a closed group interacting with the outside world, with a boundary between those who participate and are recognized in it, and the others [68], in this case the simple contributors and especially the users. It is a chosen community, by newcomers who have made the effort to be accepted, and by the old ones who have accepted them. Its borders are porous, otherwise the community disappears in the more or less long term, but at each moment the “members” of the community are able to identify whether a contributor is part of it or not.

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1This presentation relies on the reading of [8] of what a common is.

2The 8 main “rules” for managing the commons are presented here.