LDigital has transformed our lives. If many of us enthusiastically adopt the services and objects that accompany them, we are just as many to worry about the power taken by the large Web platforms, the massive surveillance of citizens by States sometimes even democratic, among other pernicious effects. Both public and private authorities are seeking to appropriate this fantastic toy to put it at their service. Do we have no other solution than to accept total digital control by the private or the public? However, there is one: the “digital commons”.
We are going to bring together under this flag superb digital successes such as Wikipedia and its millions of articles, free software, the some 40,000 open datasets published on Data.gouv.fr, the millions of scientific articles in free access, but also the Internet and the Web themselves.
Humans have always learned to manage resources collectively, like the fish in a communal pond. With complete “laisser-faire”, someone could fish all the fish out of the lake and deprive others of it. So, we make the lake a common, by establishing rules to preserve the resource. This is the starting point of this notion, studied by the American economist Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012, Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009). Let’s give the definition from Wikipedia: “The commons are resources shared, managed and maintained collectively by a community; it establishes rules with the aim of preserving and perpetuating these resources while providing the members of this community with the possibility and the right to use them, or even, if the community so decides, by granting this right to all. »
Consumption and contribution
Pastures, rivers or woods are rival resources: if I catch a fish, it’s one less fish for the community. In the digital world, resources are non-rivalrous: if I make a new copy of software, that does not diminish other people’s access to this software; millions of copies can be made. This non-rivalry is the basis of the success of the idea of installing commons in the digital world. But not only: digital also facilitates collaborative work, exchanges between people at levels still inconceivable in the world before. The life of the community and the collective management of resources are therefore facilitated by digital technology.
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