With this post, David Bollier beat me to the honor of introducing this important new book to the blogosphere. He’s one of the authors, so he deserves the honor. My copy of this important new work just arrived. If you are interested enough in the overarching economic and political changes that both enable and are enabled by DIY media to have read Benkler and Jenkins, you need to read this book. I was reminded of the importance of commons discourse to DIY media when I read this in Bollier’s chapter:

As the Internet and various digital technologies have become pervasive in American life, enabling robust new forms of social communication and collaboration, the cornucopia of t he commons has become a widespread phenomenon. We are migrating from a print culture of scarce supplies of fixed, canonical works to a digital culture of constantly evolving works that can be reproduced and distributed easily at virtually no cost. Our mass-media system of centralized production and one-to-many distribution is being eclipsed by a multimedia network of decentralized production and many-to-many distribution.

Here is a brief excerpt from Bollier’s blog post, introducing the book.

Two leading scholars on the commons, Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, have just published a great anthology of essays, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (MIT Press). The book brings together some varied perspectives on knowledge as a “shared social-ecological system.” I highly recommend it.

The idea that knowledge is incubated and maintained through social communities is hardly revolutionary, of course. But the rise of the Internet has suddenly made it more imperative to understand the structure and norms of “knowledge communities,” which can vary widely. This book helps sort through this variety with chapters on open access scholarly publishing (Peter Suber), research libraries (Wendy Pradt Lougee), science as a commons (James Boyle), open source software (Charles Schweik), preserving the knowledge commons (Donald J. Waters) and civic engagement and knowledge commons (Peter Levine), among others. I am pleased to be among this illustrious company with a chapter on “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm.”

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