Funding the Commons | Public Goods Funding

Who Pays for the Commons?

Three and a half years after the emergence of generative AI as a new technology paradigm, there is broad agreement that AI companies have extracted enorm...

AI Commons - One Project

What if we could redefine AI? What if we could shift its development from a capitalist model to a more disruptive, inclusive, and decentralized one?

Public AI Network

A coalition building AI as public infrastructure.

Reinventing Commons Governance in Modern Times | David Bollier

I gave the following remarks about commons governance on September 27 as part of the U!REKA Lab Lecture Series. U!REKA -- which stands for Urban Research and Education Knowledge Alliance -- is a consortium of eight European universities that studies urban commons. The subtitle of my talk was "Find Answers by Living the Questions."

Think Like a Commoner | A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons

In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.

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."

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.

SCA - News and views from across our networks

Over the last few years, SCVO has been engaging with organisations across the voluntary sector to collect evidence on the issues and barriers faced around access to funding. The evidence collected clearly demonstrates the urgent need for Fair Funding. We, along with many of our intermediary network members have contributed to this work, providing case studies relating to Government priorities as well as sector wide themes, illustrating why implementing Fair Funding is an investment in Scotland’s essential voluntary sector for a sustainable future.

Commons

The commons are the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.

The Paradox of Reuse in 2026: A Case of Quasi-Enclosure, or "Subsidized Club Goods that Sort of Look Like Public Goods"

How we can understand, and react to, the complicated impacts of AI systems on online communities and knowledge commons

The Paradox of Reuse in 2026: A Case of Quasi-Enclosure, or "Subsidized Club Goods that Sort of Look Like Public Goods"

How we can understand, and react to, the complicated impacts of AI systems on online communities and knowledge commons

Kami of the Commons: Towards Designing Agentic AI to Steward the Commons

Commons suffer from neglect, free-riding, and a persistent deficit of care. Inspired by Shinto animism -- where every forest, river, and mountain has its own \emph{kami}, a spirit that inhabits and cares for that place -- we provoke: what if every commons had its own AI steward? Through a speculative design workshop where fifteen participants used Protocol Futuring, we surface both new opportunities and new dangers. Agentic AI offers the possibility of continuously supporting commons with programmable agency and care -- stewards that mediate family life as the most intimate commons, preserve collective knowledge, govern shared natural resources, and sustain community welfare. But when every commons has its own steward, second-order effects emerge: stewards contest stewards as overlapping commons collide; individuals caught between multiple stewards face new politics of care and constraint; the stewards themselves become commons requiring governance. This work opens \emph{agentive governance as commoning design material} -- a new design space for the agency, care ethics, and accountability of AI stewards of shared resources -- radically different from surveillance or optimization.

Prosperous Software Movement | Open Source Observer

Bringing sustainable funding to public goods by revenue-sharing towards dependencies

A Revised “Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons

A Revised “Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons” The traditional economic definition of “the commons” are those resources...