Re-imagining Digital Commons – Making Commons Visible and Accessible

1. Re-imagining Digital Commons – Making Commons Visible and Accessible

Subrata Singh

Foundation for Ecological Security, India

Digital data and technologies are changing the way commons are managed, providing new perspectives on commons as well as enabling creation of new commons. Digital data – spatial or non-spatial have the ability to make commons visible, enabling access to information on common-pool resources, programme interventions and allow for better governance of the resources.

Most organisations, governments and donors today recognize the importance of data to reach scale. For Commons to become a strong ecosystem, it has to unlock the power of trusted and verified data that enables observability and trust (between practitioners and the programme/state), thereby empowering the individual and community to lead change from the front. The challenge however is, either there is no data or data collected does not match the data quality standards of verifiability, trust, accountability and privacy. The insights thus gathered do not support a fact-based governance, resulting in extreme pressure on the first mile cadre (practitioners) to deliver extraordinary outcomes. This session initiates discussion to understand this pivotal problem and unlock our imagination to deliver impact at scale.

2. Making global change visible, accessible and actionable with satellite-based Earth observation data

Robbie Schingler (presented by Njeri Maina)

Planet Labs PBC, USA

Since humans first strapped a camera to the upper stage of a rocket and looked back at our home planet, the population of the planet has tripled. NASA’s Landsat program has been monitoring the entire land area of the planet every two weeks for over 50 years. Today, NASA and the European Space Agency have an open data policy making its science data freely available to the global public as a digital public good. This time series data is making global change visible as we watch our cities grow, forests shrink, icecaps melt and humans accelerate the terraformation of our home planet and natural ecosystems to feed a growing population and fuel an industrialized global economy.

Over the past decade, with the rise of cloud computing and artificial intelligence technology, this big data is now accessible and becoming more actionable. Fueled by these and other technologies, Planet Labs PBC (Planet) operates the world’s largest constellation of Earth Observing satellites that images the whole world every day to make global change visible, accessible and actionable. Planet has balanced building a mission aligned business with maximizing public benefit and has innovated to make certain data a global commons. We discuss lessons learned from Norway’s NICFI Satellite Data Program for curbing deforestation, the Allen Coral Atlas mapping for the first time the world’s coral reefs, and Carbonmapper.org to monitor the world’s methane super emitters as three operational examples.

3. Masherg’s Law, Market Failure, and the Commons of Personal and Community Attention

Steven Tarr

Independent, USA

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Each person’s ability to consume the flood of digital information has been exceeded many times over. We tend to look at a commons as something “out there” to be managed. However, our personal attention and our community attention are each limited capacity commons regularly over-consumed by information suppliers, with the consequent individual and societal costs. Suppliers compete for our attention with a flood of low-quality information. This phenomenon is examined through a systems approach of economic principles, consumer and supplier behavior, information asymmetry, technology, and unique aspects of price and quality. Seven factors drive the system dynamics: one, technology enables fast inexpensive distribution such as television, websites, or social media, consuming limited mental bandwidth; two, existing laws protect distributors from content liability, like Section 230 in the United States; three, factual information is costly and its value fades quickly in the 24 hour news cycle; four, opinions have legal protection and facts do not; five, consumers perceive news is free because of supplier secondary payment mechanisms, creating pollution of externalities; six, consumers cannot process the immense volume of news which is subject to Masherg’s Law, where bad information drives out good information. And seven, suppliers develop sophisticated quality definitions for themselves and consumers, far beyond the knowledge and resources of a consumer to know their own quality definition. These seven factors have converged, with information market failure and role reversal where suppliers become consumers of our finite personal and community attention.

4. Embedding Data Systems for the Governance of Commons: Insights from India

Vidya Viswanathan¹ and Pooja Chandran²

¹Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research (SAFAR), India, ²Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), India

Commons, such as grazing lands, community forests or water bodies, sustain over 350 million rural poor in India and serve as the lifeblood of the rural economy. Effective governance of these resources is essential to reduce poverty, build resilient livelihoods, conserve biodiversity, and mitigate the impacts of climate change. However, realizing their true potential is challenging due to the complexity of the resource systems, competing interests among diverse user groups, overlapping property regimes, and weak law enforcement.
India’s regulatory agencies, such as the pollution control boards, groundwater boards, or conflict-resolving tribunals play a crucial role in enforcing laws, implementing policies, building capacities, resolving conflicts, and promoting multi-stakeholder dialogues to effectively govern natural resources. Making these institutions more accountable and participatory will foreground the community’s agency to protect their common resources. The use of data systems that proactively disclose and demystify information for communities is essential in this effort, as it will enable real-time community monitoring and analysis, facilitate communication among stakeholders, and support evidence-based decision-making.
Building on existing research case studies from diverse contexts in India, we illustrate how regulatory institutions can use data systems to improve the governance of Commons. While highlighting the successful practices, we also discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with scaling data systems. Finally, we suggest possible pathways for regulatory institutions to ensure adaptive management and support community-led governance of natural resources.