A Practical Framework for Applying Ostrom’s Principles to Data Commons Governance

Abstract

When a group of people collectively decide to organize a system to govern a shared data resource and their use of it, a data commons arises. A data commons is a system of stewardship through which data resources are managed involving processes of sustainable and ethical production, use, re-use, and redistribution — and governed through collaboration among stakeholding users and/or data producers. In this system of stewardship, how do stakeholders govern themselves? What drives their endeavour? How do they make decisions? How do they make sure conflict does not tear them apart? The answers to these questions will look different for every data commons. Some might seek revenue by selling insights based on the data, while others might want to share it openly, and yet others might want to keep most of the data private or impose copyleft-like or non-commercial conditions on re-use. They may also use different mechanisms to make decisions, which raises questions about decision-making processes, delegation of responsibility, and sanctions for improper use. Some data commons may have members who vote on the important questions, and others might elect representatives to help manage the day-to-day. Despite a wide range of possible organizational structures, it is possible to identify some core principles that characterize healthy commons — in order to guide the stakeholders of a data commons through the process of designing and adapting their institutional arrangements accordingly. Fortunately, we do not have to start from scratch. We can use the foundation laid by Elinor Ostrom in her seminal work on commons governance and pull from her empirical study of how communities stewarded both physical and, eventually, information-based commons. This work focuses on the regenerative and sustainable potential of commons governance, in contrast to the oft-touted ‘tragedy of the commons’, and identifies practices shared by successful and enduring commons. In the past few decades, the eight principles that she and her collaborators have put forth have acted as a starting point for determining appropriate governance strategies for a range of collectively-governed resources, including extending these principles to purely digital spaces such as open-source software and digital public goods. Building on this work, we here present an attempt to translate these principles to the specific case of data commons, bringing them down to earth in tangling with questions of ownership, storage, use, privacy, and regulation. In conversations with practitioners and community members, we’ve found that there is a desire to apply the tenets of commons-based approaches, but there still exists a usability gap with the principles as articulated. Thus, our translation includes not only a treatment of the principles themselves, but also a set of accompanying questions, to steer communities in productive directions as they negotiate the tradeoffs and nuances of dealing with data commons. This body of work relies heavily on previous efforts to translate Ostrom’s design principles to the contexts of data commons by the Ada Lovelace Foundation. In addition, we were heavily inspired and influenced by earlier work done by SustainOSS that embarked on a similar translation of the design principles focused on the governance of Open Source Software projects.