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Reposted at Growing the Commons where anyone can comment.
2025-10-19
In my previous piece, I sketched out why commons initiatives need knowledge commons as an integral part. But just saying “knowledge” and “commons” doesn't dictate a specific approach to creating and maintaining this knowledge commons. There have been, and still are, several approaches.
Right now, I'm working with Growing the Commons (“GtC”) and Bioregional Knowledge Commons (“BKC”), and my intention for this series is to contribute to the structuring of at least both of these.
Right up front, let's clarify that we are talking about the kinds of knowledge that are expressible and communicable, not private knowledge. We are very familiar with the kind of knowledge that can be expressed in words, and that is very easy to represent on web pages like this. But knowledge commons can also deal with the kind of knowledge – including what is known as “know-how” – that is expressed and communicated through action — and there are many kinds of action. Currently, videos can be a good start for communicating this kind of knowledge, but in-person experience, such as apprenticeship, is often more effective. Even if the knowledge itself cannot be fully expressed in words on a page, what can still be represented in a knowledge commons is information about who has that knowledge, how to connect with them, and how and when they are open to sharing their knowledge.
There are of course many ways of acquiring knowledge, including most obviously just observing what happens, but communicating knowledge from person to person is a different matter. Before humans developed writing, knowledge was just transmitted by human words and actions, which relied on having personal contact with your collaborators. There's no reason why this form of knowledge commons shouldn't still work fine, for these traditional commons. If everyone around knows and understands how a commons works, there's no need to write down the rules: social pressure is enough, without institutions.
Once cities and empires came along, people couldn't all talk to each other, so laws etc. needed to be written down (sometimes in multiple languages). However writing – along with publishing, sharing and spreading ideas – was not generally available to common people. As reading and writing became more common, communication at a distance was at first just one-to-one letter writing. Then came one-to-one speech by telephone, then only recently video conferencing. In the first incarnation of the Web, creating web sites was still limited to those with technical knowledge and resources. Now, particularly with social media, there is a deluge, a cacophony of information, where the valuable signals are drowned out in the noise.1)
To address our current, more complex, and more global challenges, how can we collaboratively put together the diverse experience and wisdom of the many people who wish to address them? Last time, I set out some questions that I saw were common to most if not all commons, so the question becomes, how can we bring together answers to those questions? Who knows what technologies may be able to help us in the future, but for now I see the most promising approach – for documenting verbal knowledge and pointing to non-verbal – as being with well-ordered wikis.
Why wikis? First, we need a technology that is most easily available and usable for the range and diversity of people whose perspectives we want. That accessibility needs to extend right down to the simplicity of writing and editing the material on a computer, or other device. Well, you may ask, aren't services that the likes of Google provide good enough? Yes, they are well designed for collaborative composition and editing of single documents. I, too, often use them for that. But the knowledge we want to bring together is highly relational in nature, and most systems don't give you such an easy way to link documents together. This is the key advantage of wiki systems over Google Docs.
A separate consideration is that we are building and supporting Commons, not the usual corporately-owned commercial systems. The big tech providers are diametrically opposed to the commons in their economic models and power structures. So we really don't want to rely on tech giants for our knowledge commons. Political powers that maintain themselves through dividing and ruling don't want their citizens to be doing too much linking up. I'm not suggesting a conscious conspiracy here, but it's easy to see that linking up the knowledge and experience of common people could be seen as a challenge to established power.
The fact that it is so easy to link wiki pages together leads to three related benefits.
Which brings us to the core of this work. How do we structure a knowledge commons wiki, to support commoning and bioregional initiatives? There is also the question of categorising the content, but that is not what I'm addressing here and now — I hinted at that in the previous piece, and I will follow up separately later. Rather, given that a wiki is composed of discrete pages, I'm looking at other questions, and I'll set them out here.
First, there's what I could call the page ontology: the way that the wiki is structured in terms of the pages it contains, and the relationships between those pages. We can ask a few questions where the answers will help us make better decisions on structuring.
A knowledge commons wiki isn't the real world, it's just a representation: “the map is not the territory” as the saying goes. Our job is to choose a map or representation that is most useful for our purposes. Oh, and, what were our overall purposes in knowledge commoning? Here are the ones most obvious to me.
The first two of these we could call the commoning process. Related to these two, we might ask:
The third point, about learning, brings up another range of challenges. The point of documenting knowledge is not only to remind oneself or other contributors, but also to help other people who want to learn and know about the documented topics. Learners need to be able to find where the knowledge they want to know is documented. Then it needs to be presented in a way in which they can assimilate. Given the large potential range of people who may want to learn about commons and commoning, this is a real challenge! Two points strike me as being helpful in any case.
Beyond the structuring of whole pages and the links between them, there is also the question of the structure of each page. The more we can give pages a similar internal structure, the more easily readers will be able to take in what is presented. So I will continue on two separate pages:
By the way, have you (reading this!) seen anywhere else where these questions are addressed? I'd love to know!