Interesting article on CPRs which I missed from Howard Rheingold. [Hat tip to Ross]. As Wikipedia has it,

a common-pool resource is a natural or human made resource system the size or characteristics of which makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use.

Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist wrote a book a while ago called Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. It sounds fascinating.

According to Rheingold,

Ostrom claims that “all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems.” These problems are “coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules.” Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member’s behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.”

A brief bit more looking around found Scott London’s review of Ostrom’s book:

“The three dominant models — the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’s dilemma, and the logic of collective action — are all inadequate, she says, for they are based on the free-rider problem where individual, rational, resource users act against the best interest of the users collectively. These models are not necessarily wrong, Ostrom states, rather the conditions under which they hold are very particular. They apply only when the many, independently acting individuals involved have high discount rates and little mutual trust, no capacity to communicate or to enter into binding agreements, and when they do not arrange for monitoring and enforcing mechanisms to avoid overinvestment and overuse.”

Definitely off to the library for this one. And will be interested to see what a pro has to say on things like Swiss governance models for wikis.