In Brief: Two motions regarding
The Commons, Short and Sweet | David Bollier
I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp. In preparation for a talk that I gave at the Caux Forum for Human Security, near Montreux, Switzerland, I came up with a fairly short overview, which I have copied below. I think it gets to the nub of things.
An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons
I recently read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and have been evangelizing it so enthusiastically that I figured I’d do a quick…
Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them
A few days ago, I came across a blog post titled On FLOSS and training LLMs that articulates a growing frustration within the free and open source software…
The Commons Explained in 15 Minutes | David Bollier
Unlocking the commons
"The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don't just permit but <em>insist</em> that the product be given away for free."
Elinor Ostrom’s 8 rules for managing the commons
The commons are those things that we all own together, that are neither privately owned, nor managed by the government on our behalf. Some are large scale and somewhat abstract, such as the English…
Meet the Pirates of the RAG: Adaptively Attacking LLMs to Leak Knowledge Bases
Meet the Pirates of the RAG: Adaptively Attacking LLMs to Leak Knowledge Bases
2026 in LLMs (so far)
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological …
Is Digital Campaigning Dead?
The Commons is an online library for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, organising, advocacy and justice.
The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth | Aeon Essays
Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight
Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update) - <antirez>
2022 Australian Federal Election Analysis
The Commons is an online library for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, organising, advocacy and justice.
Elections and Activism: Case Studies
The Commons is an online library for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, organising, advocacy and justice.
On Betraying Principles
Why Creative Commons must be about more than reducing friction on reuse This week, I had the experience of being told the work we are doing at Creative Commons right now is betraying the founding principles of the organization. This is not the first time and it won’t be the last.
Elections and Activism: Campaign Skills
The Commons is an online library for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, organising, advocacy and justice.
New to the Commons? | David Bollier
If you’re coming to the commons for the first time, it can be difficult to grok the idea because there are so many different ways to understand the commons. That’s because the commons is not so much a fixed, universal thing as a general concept describing durable, dynamic sets of social relationships for managing resources -- all sorts of resources: digital, urban, natural, indigenous, rural, cultural, scientific, to use some crude categories.