Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Framework For Analyzing The Knowledge Commons : A Chapter From Understanding Knowledge As A Commons: From Theory To Practice., Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom

Libraries' and Librarians' Publications

Who hasn’t heard of the six blind men of Indostan encircled around an elephant?1 The six—one a political scientist, one a librarian, one an economist, one a law professor, one a computer scientist, and one an anthropologist—discover, based on their own investigations, that the object before them is a wall, spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, and a rope. The story fits well with the question that propelled this chapter: how can an interdisciplinary group of scholars best analyze a highly complex, rapidly evolving, elephantine resource such as knowledge? Trying to get one’s hands around knowledge as a shared …