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A Case Study in the Creation and Management of a Common Pool Resource Department of Economics Working Paper Series Hackerspaces: A Case Study in the Creation and Management of a Common Pool Resource Michael Williams and Joshua Hall Working Paper No. 15-02 This paper can be found at the College of Business and Economics Working Paper Series homepage: http://be.wvu.edu/phd_economics/working-papers.htm Hackerspaces: A Case Study in the Creation and Management of a Common Pool Resource Michael R. Williams Olson Minneapolis, MN 55401 [email protected] Joshua C. Hall College of Business and Economics West Virginia University Morgantown, WV 26506 [email protected] Abstract Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places where individuals get together to build things. While the organization itself is private, the ‘space’ that is created for individuals to work has elements of a common pool resource (CPR). Previous literature finds technology to be important in effective CPR management. Through an ethnographic study of a hackerspace, we show how technology is crucial for management of the ‘space’. In addition, we highlight how technology is used in hackerspaces to satisfy three of Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for stable CPR management. JEL Codes: L3, Z13 Keywords: Common pool resource, design principles, hackerspaces Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank Beloit College’s Institutional Review Board for their assistance with the issues involved in this paper’s fieldwork. Comments received at the 2012 meetings of the Association of Private Enterprise Education were helpful as well. Williams acknowledges travel funding from the Charles G. Koch Student Research Colloquium at Beloit College, while Hall acknowledges general research funding from the Center for Free Enterprise at West Virginia University. Hackerspaces: A Case Study in the Creation and Management of a Common Pool Resource 1. Introduction In Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville ([1840] 1984: 201) states that “[i]n democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made.” Elinor Ostrom won the economics Nobel in 2009 for her contribution to the science of association as it relates to common pool resource (CPR) management. Ostrom (1990) lays out eight basic principles for CPR management drawing on numerous case studies of commons problems worldwide. Discovering and investigating new modes and methods of association, especially ones making use of emerging technology, is critical to de Tocqueville’s science of association and Ostrom’s work on CPR management (Ostrom, 2010). Hackerspaces are one such new form of association. They are community-operated physical places where individuals can come together to build and make things.1 Hackers pride themselves on making, playing with, and employing technology to solve old and new problems. The first hackerspaces opened in the early 2000s and took off as a movement in 2007 when a loose association of hackers met at an event called “Chaos Computer Camp”. A speech by German hackers about the hackerspace concept led to the proliferation of these community-run workshops that at first glance appear to be a pure club good. Physical space and equipment within the space, however, are rivalrous but non-excludable since all members of the space have equal access. Equality of access to the space and equipment with no predefined limit, combined with the finite nature of said resources, gives hackerspaces the characteristics of a CPR rather 1 For more on hackerspace history and background, see http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Theory. 1 than strictly a club good.2 Understanding hackerspaces as a CPR provides the impetus for our study, since nearly all papers on CPR management focus on CPRs resulting from naturally occurring resources (see, for example, Ostrom, 2010) and not on CPRs created as part of an organization. Without the ability to effectively manage the created CPR, hackerspaces and the value they create to their members would not exist. Beyond the focus on privately created CPRs, however, the unique contribution that hackerspaces can make to the studies of CPR problems is in how hackerspaces employ technology to monitor, protect, communicate and otherwise manage their space and equipment. Examining the ways that technology augments and enforces three of the CPR management design principles laid out by Ostrom (1990) is the focus of our paper. Specifically, we show that technology helps to ensure more efficient CPR management by enabling broader participation in collective-choice arrangements, improving monitoring, and reinforcing and clearly defining boundaries. The extensive use of creatively-employed technology make hackerspaces well suited for building off of Ostrom’s insights into successful CPR management (1990; 2005). 3 For example, hackerspaces’ effective use of digital communication in order to create a strongly connected community lies at the heart of why they remain effective as organizations even when growth means that everyone is no longer on a first name basis. Attention is also given to how the institutional context in which hackerspace communities function affects the development and implementation of its technological CPR management solutions. 2 We recognize that it is controversial to model the “space” of a hackerspace as a common pool resource as described by Ostrom (2010). Even if one rejects the use of the CPR terminology, however, hackerspace communities face many of the same problems in the management of the “space” that occur in naturally occurring CPRs. In both cases, if not addressed, the resource will be exhausted. 3 There are numerous definitions of “technology” in the literature. Here it is used as a general term to describe technical gadgets, apparatuses and mechanical devices. 2 The research for this paper was conducted using ethnographic methods at a hackerspace in the US Midwest we call ‘Midwest Hackerspace’ to preserve the anonymity of its members. The ethnographic research involved attending public space meetings, joining in space activities, and talking with members as they worked together on various projects. An interview guide was constructed based on data collected during the observation period and the rest of the data were collected through member interviews. The paper proceeds in the following manner. Section 2 discusses the role that technology plays in CPR management. The third section provides ethnographic and background information on Midwest Hackerspace while Section 4 discusses Ostrom’s design principles and provides evidence of how technology is used in the space to manage CPRs. Section 5 concludes. 2. The Role of Technology in the CPR Literature The CPR management literature has paid considerable attention to technology such as the decision to adopt newer technologies (Moreno and Sunding, 2005), how new technology affects public policy (Avouyi-Dovi and Matheron, 2007), and how public policy influences technology adoption (Calef and Goble, 2007). Much of the discussion surrounding technology and CPRs has explored the effects of new technologies on agricultural resources, aquatic resources, and pollution. For example, Schweik (2000), De Alessi (2003), and Klein (2003) explore how technology opens up new possibilities for CPR management by focusing on forests, fisheries, and the atmosphere. No papers, however, address the specifics of integrating technology into institutional arrangements in privately-created CPR scenarios to solve problems associated with CPR management. 3 There are many questions that can be asked on this subject. For example, does using technologically mediated monitoring reduce trust between community members by creating asymmetric power relations between those who understand the technology and those who do not? It is easy to see how someone familiar with how an implemented technology functions could use that knowledge to her advantage. Even if she did not, other members might still distrust technology that they do not understand and through association distrust members who are in favor of the technology. Beyond these questions, this paper explores how technology can help manage and create new CPR scenarios, contributing to our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of using technology in CPR management. De Alessi (2003) notes that institutions influence whether advancing technology positively or negatively affects CPR management. He provides as an example the reduction of the length of the fishing season, which created incentives for fishermen to invest in newer fishing technologies in order to capture as much of the resource as possible in a reduced timeframe. Eventually, this led to the exhaustion of the CPR. He argues that if the institutional arrangement is changed to one of private property rights where technologically feasible, the incentives will be reversed and technology will be used to protect the CPR. For example, ocean fencing technologies exist but require some private property rights from government in order for investment to occur. The key point is that technology is neither inherently beneficial nor inherently harmful to CPR management, but is rather dependent on institutional arrangements and incentives. While De Alessi’s work focuses on the possibilities for exclusion opened up by new technology, Klein (2003) shows how technology enables more effective monitoring using the example of remote sensing and auto emissions. Air pollution used to be impossible to monitor 4 but new sensor technology has made
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