- shared resources accessible to a community, governed by collective rules rather than private ownership or state control
- tragedy of the commons: overuse and depletion when individual incentives diverge from collective interest (Garrett Hardin, 1968)
- Elinor Ostrom’s eight principles for successful commons governance: clear boundaries, proportional costs/benefits, collective choice, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, self-determination, nested enterprises
- examples: fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, open-source codebases, shared knowledge
- cybergraph as digital commons: a collectively built knowledge graph where cyberlink creation is open yet governed by bandwidth scarcity
- digital commons avoid physical depletion but face spam and quality challenges, addressed through stake-weighted bandwidth allocation