The Commons keep attracting the interest of researchers from multiple perspectives. A very interesting example of this is the Quality Commons workshop that took place a few days ago (28/29 of Jan 2010) in Paris. This workshop, an initiative from the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, approaches from a multidisciplinary perspective the problem of defining quality collectively, especially concerning common goods. That is, the process of emergence of quality when it is not defined by the top but constructed in a decentralized way: "In many areas, people collectively develop shared representations of the quality of artefacts. Scientific communities produce collective ...

The Nobel of Economy of this year was considered as a pretty special one. It was shared by Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson. Ostrom is the first woman to receive such prize. But more importantly, Ostrom's prize has been an unexpected surprise to the public as well as to economists and analysts, since most economists didin't know her, as former Nobel of Economy winner Joseph Stiglitz admitted. This is mainly due to the fact that she is actually a political scientist, not an economist, and that her works have been focused in the management of common goods instead of the ...

The enclosure movement in England during the 15th and 16th centuries limited the access to land and its benefits to its owners, thus making it inaccessible to the public as it had been traditionally. This initiated the process of the privatization of common human necessities. Subsequently, the world was ruled under the logic of the capitalistic system of production, in which everything can be transformed into money, and industrialization engendered mass production. The process of privatization, linked to an unrestrained mercantilization, aggravated greed and competition. As a result, nowadays, the human civilization is in crisis ; one that could inevitably lead ...