Edited by: Leanne Ussher, Bard College, United States
Reviewed by: Michael Cooper, Independent Researcher, Denver, CO, United States; Marc Rocas-Royo, Open University of Catalonia, Spain
This article was submitted to Blockchain for Good, a section of the journal Frontiers in Blockchain
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In recent years, the increasing need for global coordination has attracted interest in the governance of global-scale commons. In the current context, we observe how online applications are ubiquitous, and how emerging technologies enable new capabilities while reshaping sectors. Thus, it is pertinent to ask: could blockchain technologies facilitate the extension and scaling up of cooperative practices and commons management in this global context? In order to address this question, we propose a focus on the most paradigmatic and widely successful examples of global cooperation: global digital commons. Examples of these are the digital resources maintained by large peer production communities, such as free/libre open source software and Wikipedia. Thus, this article identifies and analyzes the potentialities of blockchain to support the sustainability and management of global digital commons. Our approach draws on Elinor Ostrom’s classic principles for commons governance, although revisiting and adapting these to the more challenging scope of global digital commons. Thus, in this work we identify the affordances which blockchain provides (e.g., tokenization, formalization of rules, transparency or codification of trust) to support the effective management of this type of global commons. As part of our analysis, we provide numerous examples of existing blockchain projects using affordances in line with each principle, as well as potential integrations of such affordances in existing practices of peer production communities. Our analysis shows that, when considering the challenges of managing global commons (e.g., heterogeneity or scale), the potential of blockchain is particularly valuable to explore solutions that: distribute power, facilitate coordination, scale up governance, visibilize traditionally invisible work, monitor and track compliance with rules, define collective agreements, and enable cooperation across communities. These affordances and the subsequent analysis contribute to the emergent debate on blockchain-based forms of governance, first by providing analytical categories for further research, but also by providing a guide for experimentation with the development of blockchain tools to facilitate global cooperation.
This article explores the potentialities of blockchain linking it to the literature on the management of global digital commons. We draw firstly on Ostrom’s classic governance principles (1990), which remind us how human communities have successfully self-organized to manage their common resources (“commons
Considering the challenges posed by global commons, in this article, we explore the potentialities of
Since its appearance with the proposal of Bitcoin, the first distributed digital currency, blockchain technology has attracted attention for its ability to support a global scale currency and its potential to coordinate large communities without centralized control or a centralized infrastructure. Blockchain is a distributed and append-only database which, drawing on cryptography, enables coordination over the Internet without requiring central parties. Its origins are to be found in an article published anonymously under a pseudonym (
Considering these origins, blockchain technologies are, unsurprisingly, commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, new markets around emergent currencies, and overall with the disruption of finance. Nevertheless, the potential of blockchain goes beyond cryptocurrencies: it lies in its capacity to enable the implementation of novel properties at an infrastructural level in a fully decentralized manner. These properties have significant potentials, for example, for the development of tools that mediate and scale up governance processes.
To frame our analysis and in order to incorporate the identified challenges for global commons in our analysis, Section “Local Versus Global Commons” discusses the differences between the types of commons studied by Ostrom and global digital commons. Then, Section “Applications of Blockchain for Commons Governance” introduces the debate on
For our analysis, we draw on
According to
The commons studied by Ostrom are bounded at local to regional scale, in contrast to global commons. Thus, for the cases we are going to analyze, Stern’s differences and limitations are aligned with those from our analysis.
The number of participants in Ostrom’s case studies are in the tens to a few thousands, while in the global commons discussed by Stern, he assumes millions or even billions of actors involved. For our analysis, we consider large cases of CBPP communities, such as Wikipedia and large FLOSS projects such as Apache, Firefox and Drupal, that have from few millions to hundreds of thousands of participants (
The third of the differences concerns the degradation of the commons, typical of rival commons. Digital commons, such as FLOSS or digital encyclopedias, are non-rival and, furthermore, sometimes anti-rival (
In the type of commons analyzed by Ostrom, the participants share common interests with respect to the management of the resource; while in the global commons discussed by Stern, their collective interests tend to diverge significantly. Tensions, regarding different interests, appropriation and co-optation by internal and external actors, are also a common problem in large CBPP communities (e.g.,
The participants in the management of commons studied by Ostrom share a common cultural and institutional context; while in the global commons discussed by Stern they come from “all cultures, all countries, all political-economic systems, all political ideologies, and so forth” (
Learning from experience is a possible strategy in the local commons studied by Ostrom, while it is unfeasible for the type of global commons analyzed by Stern. We discard this limitation placed by Stern, since the literature shows how large CBPP communities managing global digital commons develop mechanisms and structures to facilitate the learning and extension of communitarian practices (e.g.,
Differences between local commons (
Local commons ( |
Rival global commons ( |
Global digital commons | |
1. Scale | Local | Global | Global |
2. Number of participants | Tens to thousands | Millions to billions | Hundreds of thousands to a few millions |
3. Actors’ awareness of degradation | Resource use is a conscious purpose | Resource degradation is an unintended byproduct of intentional acts | Not applicable for digital commons |
4. Distribution of interests and power | Benefits and costs mainly internal in a small group of participants | Significant externalities between participants and others | Externalities between internal participants and external actors, as in rival global commons |
5. Cultural and institutional homogeneity | Homogeneous | Heterogeneous | Heterogeneous, but with a stronger shared communal culture than for rival global commons |
6. Feasibility of learning | Good | Limited | Similar to that described for local commons, although typically online mediated |
Having provided the ground to incorporate the limitations identified by
The use of blockchain technologies to mediate governance has been increasingly attracting the attention of social scientists (
Within the debate about the potentialities of blockchain-based governance we find, on the one hand, a myriad of perspectives characterized by a high degree of techno-solutionism (
On the other hand, a critical stand against these techno-solutionist perspectives, particularly the pioneering work of
This lack of commons-oriented perspectives into the emergent debate of
These affordances drew on Ostrom’s classic principles (1990), that were derived from her studies on communities managing local commons. In the next section, we discuss them in the context of large CBPP communities managing global digital commons, such as Wikipedia and large FLOSS communities, incorporating the challenges identified by
This section will analyze the role played by blockchain technologies, drawing on the aforementioned affordances, for the governance of global digital commons. Thus, it is divided into eight subsections, one for each of Ostrom’s governance principles. For each principle, we analyze how the blockchain affordances may contribute to the management of global digital commons, considering the challenges for global commons by
Summary of the relationships between the affordances of blockchain technologies for the governance of global digital commons.
Related affordances of blockchain ( |
||
1. Define boundaries for resources and participants | - Size of participants group and required granularity | - Tokenization (I) |
2. Devise rules congruent with conditions | - Identifying the relevant conditions - Developing enforceable rules for a global context | - Self-enforcement and formalization of rules (II) |
3. Allow most users to participate in developing rules | - Size of participants’ groups and required granularity | - Tokenization (I) - Decentralization of power over the infrastructure (IV) |
4. Hold monitors accountable to users | - Conflicts of interest between parties - Establishing monitors’ independence - Need for global monitoring - Uncertainty about what to monitor - Greater difficulty establishing accountability across jurisdictions | - Self-enforcement and formalization of rules (II) - Autonomous automatization (III) - Increasing transparency (V) |
5. Apply graduated sanctions | - Authority to sanction limited because of loosely connected parties | - Self-enforcement and formalization of rules (II) - Autonomous automatization (III) |
6. Develop low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms | - Loosely connected parties - Heterogeneity in the participants | - Autonomous automatization (III) - Increasing transparency (V) |
7. Ensure that authorities permit participants to devise their rules | - Need to affirmatively facilitate local governance - Need to facilitate the learning and extension of peer-to-peer practices | - Self-enforcement and formalization of rules (II) - Decentralization of power over the infrastructure (IV) - Codification of trust (VI) |
8. Establish nested layers of organization | - Same as above cell | - Codification of trust (VI) |
Thus, next we bring together the aforementioned affordances of blockchain for each of Ostrom’s principles, contextualized within global digital commons.
This principle refers to the need to have clear boundaries regarding who has rights and privileges over the community’s commons, which becomes more challenging for global communities because of its size
In this context, the capacity of blockchain for tokenization (I) provides new capabilities to experiment with the use of different types of tokens in collaboration platforms. In particular, the distribution of tokens allows for participation rights to be more easily and granularly defined, propagated and revoked. Blockchain tokens can represent both the participation in an organization and the voting rights and power of each actor. For example, tokens can be employed to define the rights of and support decision-making around collectively managed assets, such as a co-working space or the resources employed by a cooperative of taxi drivers (
This principle defines that the rules that govern behavior or resource use in a community should be: flexible and based on local conditions that may change over time, and intimately associated with the characteristics of the resources, rather than relying on a “one-size-fits-all” regulation. As noted by
In a blockchain context, the required explicitation of rules (II) which is encompassed in the development of smart contracts has an impact on visibilizing otherwise invisible tasks, such as reproductive labor (
Also, it is worth noting that the first implementations of blockchain systems did not provide ample smart contract flexibility given the blockchain immutability, which could have affected the implementation of this principle. However, current implementations provide tools to overcome former limits and upgrade smart contracts as needed. Examples are the upgradeability
This principle defines that in order to best achieve the congruence called for in the previous principle, the members who are affected by these rules should be able to participate in their modification, and the costs of such modifications should be kept low. In line with
This principle connects to two of the affordances. Firstly, as in the case of the previous principle, the aforementioned capacity for tokenization (I) of blockchain technologies could be employed to readdress latent power relations in these communities. The result could help to increase the participation of members who have traditionally had less power, and to give greater visibility to the differences of power within a community. Secondly, it relates to the affordance provided by blockchain to decentralize the power over the infrastructure (IV).
The control over the infrastructure (e.g., servers) which sustains, for example, the main collaboration platforms (e.g., Wikipedia’s), commonly emerges as a point of organizational tension, that entails constant negotiation to generate collective-choice agreements (e.g., who can access and control Wikipedia’s servers). When CBPP communities start to grow substantially, they normally try to decentralize control over this infrastructure, which is commonly achieved by incrementing the degree of formalization. For example, defining more explicit and rigid organizational processes, roles and even formal institutions, such as the Wikimedia Foundation (
In large FLOSS communities the “threat of forking
While, in technical terms, forking code has become a simple operation, forking the infrastructure remains a complex matter which is significantly costly in terms of effort. Indeed, when forks in FLOSS communities occur, those who decide to fork the code usually need to create a new infrastructure from scratch. The use of blockchain technologies offers, in this respect, a promising field of experimentation and exploration of potential changes in these dynamics. The inherent properties of blockchain technologies facilitate the forking of the whole infrastructure and even the communitarian rules which have been encoded in them. Thus, the decentralization of the infrastructure reduces the technical cost to fork the community, reducing the power within the community of those previously in control of the infrastructure. In other words, the “threat of forking” conditions the processes of negotiation since participants holding more power are expected to maintain a general direction of the project which acknowledges and includes the main desires of the community.
These examples allow us to imagine scenarios of the possible opportunities gained by decentralizing power over the infrastructure in CBPP. Blockchain technologies may shape these dynamics by offering a higher degree of pressure for negotiation on those holding more power in the community, and eventually it may foster permissionless innovation (
This principle concerns some participants in the community acting as monitors of behavior in accordance with the rules derived from collective choice arrangements. These participants should be accountable to the rest of the community.
Several of the affordances of blockchain for commons governance remain potentially useful in the context of global digital commons. On the one hand, the affordances for self-enforcement (II) of smart contracts and, more widely, that of autonomous automatization (III) – without human mediation – provide further means to track and communally fiscalize new aspects of the organizational processes. Secondly, the blockchain affordance of increasing transparency (V) may enable higher accountability, and might lead to more peer-to-peer forms of monitoring. Peer-to-peer monitoring is usual in CBPP communities, as part of their strong culture of openness. This culture of openness also involves the opening of the data generated in the collaboration processes. This constitutes a useful means for CBPP communities to successfully carry out and scale up their processes of monitoring.
Thus, blockchain might facilitate the monitoring of community rules. On the one hand, smart contracts represent rules of the online communities, which may include automatic mechanisms for specific monitoring. On the other hand, all interactions are recorded in the blockchain and can be observed in real time by any party. This has already enabled users to detect and mitigate the effects of users behaving against the perceived community rules. For instance, in 2017 a hacker stole $32 million worth of cryptocurrencies in Ethereum, exploiting a software vulnerability. As a first response, a group of users called “The White Hat Group” stole all the other accounts affected by the same vulnerability ($208 million), in order to avoid it being stolen by other hackers taking advantage of it. Afterward, they returned that money to their owners, once the vulnerability was fixed (
The use of blockchain to support transparent and open peer-reviewing (
Therefore, large online communities can also use blockchain to automate certain rules and enable the monitoring of communitarian behavior transparently. In fact, existing large communities such as Wikipedia already make extensive use of transparent records to monitor user interactions, and automate a large part of the monitoring using bots, programmed with specific responsive automatic actions. Thus, blockchain may be useful to enhance this transparency, improve CBPP community monitoring, and its automation.
This principle states that participants not only actively monitor but also sanction one another when behavior is found to conflict with community rules. These sanctions against participants who violate the rules should be aligned with the perceived severity of the infraction. As with the case of monitoring,
The affordances of self-enforcement (II) and autonomous automatization (III) for blockchain-based governance for large CBPP communities managing digital commons offer, in this respect, several avenues of exploration. Smart contracts can be employed by these communities to automatically self-enforce the rules that regulate the graduated sanctions agreed in the community. Furthermore, this capacity for self-enforcement could be even more intense when considering DAOs. DAOs can take the initiative when certain events happen, and react autonomously upon circumstances or user actions. In other words, they increase the degree of impersonalization with regards to the application of the sanctions agreed by the community. The effects are unknown and could vary: from preventing the usual effect of reacting against the enforcer or “killing the messenger,” to the triggering of frustration and impotence as has been the case with previous reactions against machines (
In this respect, we can find existing examples in which blockchain software implements community sanctions. For instance, Kleros is a blockchain project providing blockchain-supported courts. In these courts, a jury formed by community members would mediate community conflict resolutions, delivering blockchain-supported verdicts. Furthermore, projects implementing these blockchain courts such as Aragon Court, have specific rules to sanction misbehaving members of the jury, since the community can start a vote to remove their power in the jury. Thus, large online communities can both encode sanctions in their smart contracts (e.g., losing a privilege if the community agrees so) and use blockchain courts to sanction behaviors against the community rules.
This principle specifies that members of the community should have easy access to spaces in which to resolve conflicts. As in the case of the principle regarding the graduated sanctions, the difficulties identified by
In this respect, the affordances of increasing transparency (V) and autonomous automatization (III) might be valuable for the design of blockchain-based tools which facilitate the scaling up of conflict resolution mechanisms in these large communities. On the one hand, transparency is commonly employed by large CBPP communities as part of their conflict resolution mechanisms. One can think, for example, of the enormous amount of content which can be found in the discussion pages of Wikipedia; or in the issue lists of FLOSS communities. These large amounts of data are not usually solely related to the digital commons maintained, but also to the organizational processes which surround them. Such transparency facilitates access, participation and visibility of conflict resolution processes.
On the other hand, the employment of the aforementioned DAOs could lead to spaces in which conflicts are made explicit, between members of a DAO, across DAOs, and between DAOs and humans. This encourages communities to establish more explicit mechanisms for conflict resolution, which may be at least partially tackled by automated processes. In fact, Aragon is already working on creating digital jurisdictions for conflict resolution within, and across, DAOs.
As previously introduced in the graduated sanctions section, some blockchain projects are developing blockchain-supported courts and other arbitration mechanisms (
The blockchain-supported courts and similar conflict resolution mechanisms could lower the cost to solve conflicts within global communities, and provide transparency to the conflict resolution processes. Moreover, the sole discussion and definition of a legitimate conflict resolution mechanism in an online community can reduce the effects of the so called “Tyranny of Structurelessness” (
This principle states that the local jurisdiction to create and enforce rules should be recognized by higher authorities. In the case of the commons studied by Ostrom, these higher authorities are commonly referred to as those of traditional institutions, such as states, regional or local governments. An example could be government officials who acknowledge the creation of local rules in the context of self-organized fishing communities. Parallelisms have been established in the case of digital commons, but referring to higher authorities as the most formal and centralized institutions which commonly emerge in these communities, such as the Wikimedia Foundation (
This principle, hence, connects with several affordances of blockchain. First of all, with the capacity of blockchain to self-enforce rules (II) and its relationship to formalize and codify agreements to facilitate the scaling up of trust (VI). Continuing with our examples of Wikipedia and large FLOSS communities, such smart contracts could embed the agreements within the aforementioned WikiProject or FLOSS sub-projects, in ways which encode that the local aspects are only decided by participants belonging to such projects. In other words, if we think of these communities as networks, blockchain-based tools for commons governance might help local nodes of CBPP communities to more easily ensure, by code, that their local jurisdiction
Additionally, this principle relates to the decentralization of power over infrastructure (IV). In Section “Collective Choice Arrangements,” several examples of this affordance were discussed regarding the increasing capacity for forkability and its relationship to social aspects. Similarly, in this scenario it can facilitate a higher degree of autonomy to the local spaces which emerge over time. In other words, the differences in forms of pressure may provide new conditions for the negotiations that relate to having their local contexts and jurisdictions acknowledged by higher authorities.
The use of blockchain in virtual reality projects such as Decentraland (
The last of Ostrom’s principles states that, by forming multiple nested layers of organization, communities can address issues that affect resource management differently at broader and very local levels in order to scale up their governance. This is in line with
In this respect, the affordance of blockchain for the codification of trust (VI), implemented through interoperability, offers avenues for future exploration. In technical terms, interoperability refers to the property of a system to operate with other systems through a series of interfaces. Such interfaces codify the rules of interaction of different units, and thus codify part of the trust, facilitating interaction. Blockchain provides affordances to increase the degree of collaboration not only through the generation of interfaces, but also by providing a full communal infrastructure: a shared decentralized database. This process of codification of trust may simply refer to the individuals and their interactions, as in the case of the transactions of cryptocurrencies. However, it may also involve the agreements arranged between the different groups that form part of the community, fostering the capacity of these communities to scale up governance in polycentric ways. Thus, and returning again to our previous examples of Wikipedia and large FLOSS projects, one can envision tools designed to facilitate polycentric governance in CBPP communities in the form of different locally shaped platforms encoding agreements according to the local conditions of each group, such as WikiGroups and FLOSS sub-projects within the general project. These platforms could be autonomously governed by the participants who belong to each of the groups, but interoperate between them and with the general platform at a broader level through federal agreements.
Cryptokitties (
In this article, we have explored the potentialities of blockchain to facilitate and scale up the governance of large and global CBPP communities managing digital commons. As we have shown, there are numerous examples of blockchain communities that make use of practices that may be beneficial if adopted by these CBPP communities. These practices reinforce Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s principles (1990) for sustainable community governance, taking into account the adaptation of such principles for global commons (
This article and the theoretical framework it relies on (
This work contributes to the emergent literature on blockchain-based forms of governance in several ways. First, it analyzes the challenges encompassed by the different nature of global digital commons, when compared to those from which Ostrom’s principles were derived, while linking them with the role of blockchain. This analysis has allowed us to reflect on the role that blockchain-based technologies already play in existing blockchain projects, and their potential role in current large CBPP communities. Overall, blockchain technologies could facilitate coordination, help to scale up commons governance and even be useful to enable cooperation among various communities in interoperable ways. In addition, our analysis reveals that, when considering the challenges of managing global commons (
A better understanding of the capabilities of blockchain technologies to support global forms of commons governance will require, however, further empirical research. In fact, we strongly recommend those willing to develop blockchain tools to support CBPP to do so guided by research. Moreover, the development of such tools should be carried out hand-in-hand with the CBPP community participants, in order to avoid the multiple problems of top-down software building and algorithmic biases (
Blockchain technologies are still young, and it is still early to envision the applications and practices that will take hold within communities. Further experimentation will enable their study and monitoring to extract best practices and successful patterns that may be incorporated more easily and with lower risks into existing CBPP communities. In fact, the analysis of the current practices of existing blockchain communities (
This article has focused on the potentialities of blockchain for the governance of global digital commons. The challenges concerning other types of global commons, such as oceans and the atmosphere, would require a different analysis which incorporates specific characteristics and challenges. Future work may also explore more systematically the limitations, drawbacks and risks posed by the use of blockchain in this overall global context. The use of the blockchain affordances as categories for analysis could be useful in order to identify such risks. For example, with regards to tokenization, it would be relevant to explore the risks posed by extreme quantification and data fetishism (
Commons-Based Peer Production communities render radically different values and practices when compared with those that operate within the hegemonic logic of markets. As we have aimed to show, blockchain may facilitate the experimentation of ways in which to scale-up such forms of cooperation. We hope this combination may open up new avenues for the extension of commoning practices, and the much-needed cooperation in our world at these unsettled times.
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
DR coordinated the elaboration of the manuscript and participated in all the phases, including conceptualization, literature review, structuration, analysis, and overall writing of the article. AT-F participated in the conceptualization, structuration, analysis, and writing of the manuscript. In addition, he provided most of the blockchain examples used in Section “Affordances of Blockchain for the Governance of Global Digital Commons.” SH supervises the project this manuscript is part of, P2P Models, of which he is the Principal Investigator. In addition, he discussed the manuscript’s general approach, reviewed the manuscript, contributed to parts of it across all sections and to the discussions and examples. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
AT-F was employed by the company Decentralized Academy Ltd. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
We are grateful to the editor and the reviewers for their constructive feedback on our manuscript. We would like to thank Vasilis Kostakis and Eve Guterman for their valuable comments, as well as Tabitha Whittall for her help in copyediting and proofreading this article. Finally, we would like to thank Alexandra Elbakyan (Sci-Hub) for her contribution to make scientific knowledge available for everyone.
The commons are resources held in common, with shared ownership, and typically managed by a community under certain norms. It is distinct from both State or Market resource management. Classic examples include common lands or international waters, but also classical music (in public domain), a self-managed social center, the Internet, or Wikipedia.
Section “Affordances of Blockchain for the Governance of Global Digital Commons” includes a definition of each of these principles.
This paper focuses on the governance of global commons
A Smart Contract (
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (
The reasoning to frame our analysis through “affordances” relates to the need to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of technological determinism and technological constructivism present in the field of science and technology studies (
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Forking, in FLOSS communities, occurs when participants take a copy of source code from one project and start a new, independent and distinct version of it. This may or may not cause the fragmentation of the community in two different projects. Thus, the “threat of forking” reflects the fear of such fragmentation to occur.
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In this context, we refer to jurisdiction as the area over which the members of the node have control (
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