Mixing the Commons and Open Culture: Soup or Salad?

Over the last year, as I've mulled over various thesis topics, I've often returned to two imprecise concepts, "commons-based approaches" and "open culture", which I am now faced with sorting through in order to focus my research. In particular, now that I'm locking into "open culture" as my central topic, I need to decide whether to incorporate "the commons" or discard it altogether.

So, today, I set out to read two reports from On the Commons (formerly the Tomales Bay Institute). [One of On the Commons' key players is David Bollier, who visited CCT last fall... I wish I'd made time to see him.]

The first report, "The State of the Commons" (2003), is an overview of the commons and the political issues surrounding them. The discourse of the commons is rooted primarily in relation to natural commons (air, water, etc), but has been broadened more recently to include social and scientific resources (broadcast spectrum, the Internet, the Creative Commons, etc). "The State of the Commons" largely argues for a re-balancing of the market and the commons, through state intervention.

The second report, "The Commons Rising" (2006), is actually exactly what I've been hoping to find for quite some time. It moves beyond the first report to discuss the broad trend of a reinvigorated commons over the last decade or so. It highlights successes in protecting natural resources (pollution controls, farm and forest land trusts, etc) and expanding the "hometown commons" (public spaces, public wifi, farmers markets, community gardens).

More importantly, for my purposes, it (loosely) links these trends with the trend towards "sharing knowledge and culture", as seen in citizen journalism, the copyleft movement (open source, creative commons, etc), the scholarly commons, and culture trusts. This is precisely what I have been calling "Open Culture."

The general takeaway, for me, is that the decision rests firmly in my hands. There is more than sufficient research and literature to link the Commons to Open Culture, so the question is really just about how I choose to conduct my research. This is both a tremendous relief, as I'm now no longer worried that my attempts to link the concepts are nonsensical, and a worrisome broadening of my field of inquiry... the literature on the commons is far more extensive than on open culture, so I run the risk of losing focus if I begin to push in that direction.

In any case, I'll clearly need to read some of Bollier's work, and additional work on the commons, before I get much further.