What Must Be Common and Why

The identity layer of the Providence architecture must be common: the protocols and standards that allow participants to maintain sovereign, portable identity across the network cannot be owned by any single participant, institution, or community within the network. If they are, the owner of the identity infrastructure has governance power over the entire network that is incompatible with the distributed sovereignty that the constitutional principles require.

The trust layer must be common for the same reason: a trust infrastructure controlled by a single actor is not genuinely shared infrastructure. It is a system through which one actor can advantage or disadvantage other actors by controlling the terms on which their trustworthiness is established and communicated. The entire value of trust infrastructure depends on its independence from any actor with a stake in the outcomes it records.

The collective intelligence generated by participant contributions to the shared knowledge base — the accumulated learning from governance experiments, from ecological stewardship practices, from conflict repair processes, from community development experience across the network — must be common. If it is appropriated by any single actor, the incentive to contribute is undermined (contributors are subsidizing a private appropriator rather than investing in shared infrastructure) and the value of the commons for the network as a whole is diminished.

The ecological stewardship relationships that communities develop with the bioregions they inhabit cannot be owned in the conventional sense, because ecological systems are not ownable in the ways that conventional property law assumes. But they can be governed as commons — through governance arrangements that protect the relationship between communities and their bioregions from the kinds of disruption that would be possible if the relationship were treated as a private asset subject to alienation.

Elinor Ostrom's design principles for durable commons governance (Governing the Commons, 1990) remain the most empirically grounded foundation for thinking about how Providence's commons layer should be organized. Ostrom's eight principles — clearly defined boundaries, rules matched to local conditions, collective choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution mechanisms, recognition by external authorities, and nested enterprises for larger systems — provide a checklist against which the specific commons governance proposals in this chapter can be evaluated.

The digital commons literature, which has developed substantially in the three decades since Governing the Commons was published, addresses the specific features of commons governance in networked information environments. David Bollier's Think Like a Commoner (2014) and The Wealth of the Commons (2012, edited with Silke Helfrich) provide accessible overviews. The more technically specific work on protocol governance — including the Internet Engineering Task Force's multi-stakeholder governance model, the governance of the Linux kernel, and the governance of Wikipedia — offers case studies in how common infrastructure is managed at scale without the governance becoming either captured or incoherent.

The legal scholarship on commons-based intellectual property — including Yochai Benkler's analysis, Lawrence Lessig's foundational work on the creative commons, and the more recent scholarship on open access and open science — addresses the specific question of how collective intelligence generated by distributed contributors can be governed as common property rather than appropriated by any single actor. The specific legal instruments available — Creative Commons licenses, copyleft licensing, open data frameworks — are among the tools available to Providence's commons governance, though none of them was designed for exactly the kind of commons Providence requires.

The most significant open question in commons governance for Providence concerns the relationship between the global commons and local community autonomy. The principle of subsidiarity — that governance decisions should be made at the most local level at which they can be made well — suggests that many commons governance decisions should be made by local communities rather than by the network as a whole. But the commons is common precisely because it extends beyond any single community. The governance of the commons requires coordination at a level above the local, and the mechanisms for that coordination must be designed in ways that are responsive to local community interests without being captured by any single community's interests.