Big idea used to be openness to ensure access. But this has now changed.

Each Commons produces a thing. This one produces access. In a hierarchical, elitism structure, access is provided by experts. (Politics, higher education, government.) What changes when you go to the Long Tail is everybody provides access to everyone else. My online education sources for quadratic equations are useful to you as well. Peer-to-peer provisions. Knowledge doesn't go through the big hub but to the nearest node. This ties this Commons back to network topology.

Medicine, education, politics, internet--all the infrastructure goes here.

These are all services. Even the roads we drive on.

POSS = Public, open-source service.

Medicine is an interesting example here, because there is still a need for accountability in this sphere. Otherwise, people die. There is still a legitimate role for the State to step in when a Christian Science parent refuses medical care for their child. This is one exception to focus on. It makes the point that what we're talking about here is just some utopia.

This is not about authority going away. But rather that there can be a plurality of authorities. But in some cases, such as public health, nuclear power, etc., universality will still be appropriate. That does not mean they might not also fit into a commons of a sort. But there will be cases where things get tricky. (Christian Science, disposal of the dead or of nuclear waste, etc.)

A related point is that these Commons are not by definition completely open. There are still rules of membership involved. Not just anyone will be repairing the brakes on my car or replacing my knee.

The point is that the Commons does not mean we no longer have to negotiate to resolve difficult issues. It's rather that the people we can negotiate with will change, and can be a wider group of people than is possible now.

A sidebar addressing this will make the book stronger by making the point that Commons alone will not 'solve' human nature.

[Think Asimov's Three Laws: you present the laws primarily to set up a series of stories exploring the points where those laws break down. Because those are the places where the most interesting things happen.]

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Plurality = many points of access (lots and lots of wi-fi routers, only one protocol; or, lots of hospitals in many places; lots of schools)

Diversity = many ways of access (lots of protocols that can be used to access a given node; lots of different kinds of hospitals or schools)

M2M = In the past, I could pick which hospital I go to, but the medical establishment always remained the same. In the Commons, there are many forms of practice. No longer monolithic acceditations, but rather a diversity of

P2P = access through local nodes, not centralized pipes

D.I.O. = If there is not an entry point for a given service, you and your network can build your own (or an alternate) entry point (or network).

Objects & relations = Design for adaptability again. You want to design the entity in the network, for example the presence of a person in a legal system, to allow them to interact in different ways with that system (as opposed to, say, insisting that a person's status is static).

In medicine, studies are organized around the average body. But here, the studies would allow for regional variations. This is already starting to happen. Locally situated medical practice is allowing for, for example, characteristics of arthritis, etc, in the South. Or medical practitioners who allow tribal shamans into the process in order to gain the trust of their local communities.

Fluidity in relationships could be illustrated by not being able to sue someone in criminal courts so you sue them in civil courts. A lot of this will have to do with adhocracy.

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necessity of open access to maintain flows

Note from discussion:

In the industrial economy of the 20th century "price" is a proxy for access.

As access increases to maximum, traditional "price" reduces to zero.

Demonstrative examples:

Food certification from the government

Daycare latefee paper

A guy with a windmill who decides to share instead of storing power.

Just because 20th century "price" reduces to zero as access increases, this does not guarantee access. For instance, price of access to a file could be zero, but price of computer needed to do anything with the file could be much higher.

There are no guarantees, ever. No matter what system is created, nor what system emerges.

This is also what Yochai Benkler is trying to communicate in "Wealth of Networks".

The "currency" of access that we are proposing consists of:

A share-alike license of creative output

An openly published protocol for communication

Plurality principle applied to protocols of communication (it is possible to support many, many protocols)

access to surplus/unused resources including unused computer cycles, unused bandwidth, unused energy (it is true that we do not even need power companies for anything other than maint. of grids, if power production were massively distributed)

access to many means to store and share unused energy (could be stored even in biological material, if you think about it).

The currency of access is access.