Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

onthecommons.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–16 of 16 posts

Re: Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

#11

Post by larnmar »

The problem with “managing” a commons is the principal-agent problem — that the people you appoint to do the management will often wind up making or interpreting the rules in a way that benefits themselves.

I don’t see much in these principles to overcome that problem — the principles seem to be written on the assumption that you are the manager and that you are perfectly virtuous and want what’s best for everybody.

Divvying commons into private property has the underrated advantage that it requires less ongoing management so it has fewer opportunities for corruption.

Re: Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

#12

Post by diminoten »

HN is a commons, and follows few/none of these principles. This comment, for example, could ungenerously be considered "low effort", but that's because it's easy to dismiss a comment with few characters, so making sure the number of characters written in a comment is long enough to match the magical "not low effort" value that's applied (unevenly, to be clear).

Even trying to talk about this problem leads to censorship on this site.

Re: Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

#13

Post by ggm »

diminoten wrote: post #12

HN is a commons, and follows few/none of these principles. This comment, for example, could ungenerously be considered "low effort", but that's because it's easy to dismiss a comment with few characters, so making sure the number of characters written in a comment is long enough to match the magical "not low effort" value that's applied (unevenly, to be clear). Even trying to talk about this problem leads to censorsh…

Even trying to talk about this problem leads to censorship on this site

Trying to bypass filters in noise and tone does incur downvoting, yes. I've been guilty of the offence and of the downvoting. Part of policing the commons is that some things people want to do in the commons are low damage but not no damage: we forbid murder but we also make you pick up your litter kind of costs. Is all litter picked up? No. But, most is, and very little murder goes unnoticed on HN

Re: Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

#14

Post by nickik »

larnmar wrote: post #11

The problem with “managing” a commons is the principal-agent problem — that the people you appoint to do the management will often wind up making or interpreting the rules in a way that benefits themselves. I don’t see much in these principles to overcome that problem — the principles seem to be written on the assumption that you are the manager and that you are perfectly virtuous and want what’s best for everybody.…

Her work absolutely addresses principal-agent problems. In fact that is the core of her work.

Re: Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

#15

Post by nickik »

icebraining wrote: post #5
RangerScience wrote: post #2

I've been wondering - what happens if you consider a market as a form of commons that companies need to take care of in the same way (or suffer the same tragedy)? The examples that come to mind are telecoms in rural areas (what with all the town stepping in to do it themselves) and healthcare (what with the general sentiment (AFAIK) that the status quo (in the US) isn't working).

Telecoms in rural areas seems like the opposite problem: nobody wants to exploit that market, due to very high costs. Healthcare in the US, on the other hand, is such a morass of regulations (including patents), subsidization programs and conflicting interests that I can't see it fit any simple model.

> Healthcare in the US, on the other hand, is such a morass of regulations (including patents), subsidization programs and conflicting interests that I can't see it fit any simple model.

This is a very good points. Some of these programs are just so huge and so complex, its crazy. We are talking about almost 20% of GDP that is regulated in a incredibly complex ways, has massive amount of government money spent on it as well.

Re: Elinor Ostrom's Principles for Managing a Commons (2011)

#16

Post by talkingtab »

I found this remarkably refreshing, although as yet my knowledge of her writing is still zero. Any good references, articles books etc, other than the ones mentioned in the article.

Does it strike anyone else that the model of an internet commons is worth exploring? Is reddit for example a kind of commons? Sharing resources, like a field for cows (aka the Boston Commons) is one kind of physical commons, but isn't the internet another?

Post reply on HN