Elliot Bledsoe
From apc.au wiki
For Growing the Global Information Commons (commissioned paper) and Nailing The Commons (micro-doc).
day02 - Clip 042
APC: What is your understanding of the commons?
Elliott Bledsoe: Well, the commons comes in many forms. There are many different ideas of what a commons is. Some people think it's anything that's publicly available with limited or no restriction on it. So, everything from public transport to public libraries, that kind of thing.
There's also the legal concept of the commons which is everything that's... where copyright has expired therefore there's no rights attached to that work any more. There's a number of different ways of identifying the commons.
APC: What does the commons personally mean to you?
Elliott Bledsoe: To me the commons is about being able to reuse content and knowing that you can. It's about certainty. And that, you know, things should be available to use... and increasingly that gets narrowed down. So, my idea of commons is that it's actually much smaller and no where near as robust as it should be, but that we can fix that.
APC: Do you see a dividing line between the information and knowledge commons?
Elliott Bledsoe: Not really. One's the natural prior point to the other. Information is the foundation of knowledge. The way that we understand and draw together a number of ideas or pieces of information becomes a foundation of knowledge. How we put that information and how we make sense of that... So, no... I think that one requires the other. That knowledge without information is not particularly useful, but that where knowledge... you know, there's a lot of really good, solid information in it makes it much stronger.
APC: What are the main commons issues?
Elliott Bledsoe: Well, the problem is everybody wants to stake a claim. The user wants to be able to do what they like with stuff that they see and stuff that's around them. The creators want to take advantage of the commons space for promotion, for potential revenue gain and for sharing, for just making their stuff available.
The lawyers want to carve it up, dissect it and state where it starts and where it finishes and what the boundaries are and how you get in... The democracy organisations and large institutions want to fill this space with certain kinds of information on an idea that's going to help further democracy as a concept.
There's a number of different groups who are all trying to stake a claim in this idea of an information commons.
APC: And out of this which one [issue] would you prioritise?
Elliott Bledsoe: I think access is the biggest thing we should be looking at. And if that means that the lawyers need to be what they can to make more stuff available and the democracy organisations need to be doing what they can to make the space as linguistically accessible and, as technologically accessible as they can to the widest number of people... you know, I think that all these kinds of organisations have a very important role to play in making sure that this space is wider, stronger, more robust and is accessible to the widest number of people possible.
APC: Is it the same set of priority issues in the developing world?
Elliott Bledsoe: Well, to be honest I think the developing world isn't quite sure what to make of it. You know, they're already got a barrier. Both, in a lot of cases linguistically, but also technologically and economically and so, as a result there's this very western idea that we need to get the information commons out there for the developing world without giving much of an opportunity for the developing world to stake their claim.
What is and what should the commons look like for developing nations. We very rarely pose that question to developing nations themselves. You know, I do think that it's very important that they have an active and participatory role in the development of the commons, but I'm not quite sure we're there yet.
APC: So you think that if we lift this barrier then its the danger that instead of developing their own commons they will have easy access to ours, to the northern commons?
Elliott Bledsoe: Exactly. If we don't diversify the commons and if we don't input multiple ways of understanding and drawing meaning out of work, which is things like language and file formats... trying to make as diverse space as we can we run the problem of cultural imperialism. We just dump all of our ideas into this space and say, there you go we've given it to you, you know, take what you want from it, without any real analysis of what affect that has on culture and learning and understanding for people who are outside of that context.
