The commons
1 min read · 107 words
A shared machine is a commons, and commons have known physics. We borrowed from the people who learned this before the cloud existed.
Guifi.net — the world's largest community network — runs on Elinor Ostrom's design principles: clear boundaries, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and a conflict-resolution procedure for the day someone sees something they should not have. NYC Mesh isolates its members from one another by default: members connect to the network, to each other they are strangers. Both lessons are now ours. A community node is a shared uplink and a shared library, never a shared hard drive; and "Alice saw Bob's corpus" is a governance event.