Medialab Prado

Audio of the session:

On El potlatch digital. Wikipedia y el triunfo del procomún y el conocimiento compartido:

In the year 1968, Garret Hardin published in Science magazine a decisive article, entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”, where he reflected on the problems related with the management of common goods and resources, and alerted us of the danger for their survival. Economic Noble Prize Winner Elinor Ostrom would spend most of her professional life researching those mechanisms of collective action and commons solidarity management, trying to find the common structural features of positive practices. With the advent of Internet and the digitalization of knowledge, there has been a rebirth of these issues in a new digital format: how can online communities, whose aim is to produce shared knowledge, emerge and self-organize? That is, how can digital commons be managed? How should they be managed? Wikipedia offers a prototypical, and flourishing, example of community building, one that reaches a consensus for its politics, establishes its internal mechanisms for acknowledgement, and organizes its own control and vigilance devices, all without any cash flow. Taking the Canadian “potlatch” as an example helps us to understand how, in certain contexts and circumstances, it becomes necessary to detach a community’s capital in order to have it circulate and be reinvested in the shape of acknowledgement and recognition; how, in certain cultural contexts, the kind of capital that circulates is not economical, but symbolic, in the shape of reputation and popularity, and its accumulative logic requires it to be selfless in order to generate a different kind of interest. That is how some of the better-known Internet cases function and that is how Wikipedia has turned into a success story in the field of commons management and shared knowledge.

More information on the book is available at Editorial Cátedra website. .