David Bollier

The casual visitor to cyberspace might understandably consider free software, Wikipedia, Facebook, remix music and "open textbooks" as wildly different phenomena. But as author and Senior Lear Center Fellow David Bollier explains in a series of video interviews with Director Marty Kaplan, they are all instances of the commons, a new paradigm for creating valuable things on the Internet.

A commons arises whenever a community decides it wants to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access and sustainability, said Bollier. His describes how people share photos on Flickr.com; how scientists collectively manage their published articles and research databases; and how Grateful Dead fans created and curated their own archives of concert performance tapes -- a precursor to the type of sharing that is now common among Internet enthusiasts.

"Sometimes the commons works in competition with markets, and sometimes it collaborates with them," said Bollier, "but in either instance, the commons is demonstrating that online communities can self-organize themselves to produce some remarkable types of shared wealth. It will increasingly be a sector of economic production."

Bollier's video interviews with Kaplan were produced by Brave New Studios, an affiliate of Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films project. Check them out!