Field Guide to the Commons. Books: All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, by Jay Walljasper.
New Press, 2010 URL = ; Sample chapter at = As soon as you realize that some things belong to everyone—water, for instance, or the Internet or human knowledge—you become a commoner, part of a movement that’s reshaping how we will solve the problems facing us in the twenty-first century. [1] Campaign for Commons Literacy. Thanks to the contribution by 22 funders, which raised $1,304, we were able to bring James Quilligan, a renowned commons theorist/activist and policy analyst to London, where presented a key seminar on MANAGING the LOCAL and GLOBAL COMMONS, sharing his latest cutting-edge thinking.
The full set of the slides can be found here. His seminar demonstrated how: • consumers become the producers of their own resources. Artifacts, Facilities, And Content: Information as a Common-pool Resource. Hess and Ostrom detail the complex interdisciplinary definitions of "commons" and "public domain," establishing the discourse in the work of Scott Gordon in 1954 and Anthony Scott in 1955, who introduced economic analysis to fisheries, a natural resource that had traditionally been the domain of biologists.
"Their two articles are credited with outlining the conventional theory of the commons. " Hess and Ostrom also note the application of game theory as a way of rationalizing commons dilemmas in which "appropriation from common-pool resources is frequently represented as a one-shot or finitely repeated, Prisoner's Dilemma game. Since appropriators are viewed as being tapped in these dilemmas, repeated recommendations were made that external authorities must impose a different set of political regimes and property rights on such settings. Some recommended private property as the most efficient form of ownership. Others recommended government ownership and control.