I am a co-founder of Indicommons.

That sentence feels full of hubris, since many people ‘co-founded’ Indicommons; the position, if any, that Indicommons holds in promoting and supporting The Commons on Flickr is the result of many people’s efforts, all of whom can claim, rightly, to be co-founders of this blog and community. That sense of ‘community’ is exactly what makes The Commons vital, virile, virtual and viral.

The GLAM community this week (art galleries, libraries, archives and museums) was lit afire this week when the news spread that Flickr has disabled the registration page through 2010 for The Commons:

Due to the current backlog of requests, we will not be accepting new registrations or requests to join the Commons through 2010.

It surprises me, as both a co-founder of Indicommons and as, more recently, a staff member of Flickr, that some have mistaken this statement to mean that Flickr is not supporting The Commons or is not adding new institutions to The Commons this year. The only thing this statement can mean is (a) that there is a backlog of registrations that need to be converted to accounts and (b) that the ability to register intent to join The Commons is temporarily disabled. The Commons page is live, the ability to limit searches to only Commons material is live, and (the most important piece to The Commons) the No Known Copyright Restriction license is live on Flickr.

At the heart of it all, this infrastructure is the foundation for The Commons – everything else that makes The Commons so vital is actually the community. This infrastructure is why every report made by The Commons’ institutions since the project began two years ago states that their goals have been met and expectations exceeded. I think the strongest evidence of the power of The Commons is well captured by Seb Chan, Courtney Johnston, and Kate Theimer (ArchivesNext) in recent blog posts regarding the ‘debate’ about The Commons.

The Commons is vital: we all know this.

The community is the sum of the institutions that hold accounts on The Commons, the members who leave folksonomic information on the content in The Commons, and the staff who work behind the scenes to support the infrastructure of The Commons. Vitality is the living, breathing soul of this community; if the infrastructure brings the content of public institutions, no matter where they are physically located in the world, to people anywhere in the world with an internet connection regardless of their economic or social status and if that infrastructure lends new insight to that content, then The Commons is very much not simply alive but also vital. It is vital since it transcends physicality and propels content to those who may otherwise not have access to history or who have the ‘missing link’ that fills in the gap for archivists and enthusiasts alike.

The Commons is virile: we all should know this.

The significance of this should not be underestimated. The community is a reiterative edifice which is spiral in structure. It begins with art or history, it goes through an archival process which is largely confined within the walls of an institution, then explodes onto the public stage where new information fills any lacunas of uncertainty, thus becoming stronger evidence which answers questions about who we are or where we are or what we are and what we can become. And so the spiral repeats itself and expands itself, for as new information is pushed into the world, it provides more opportunities for new information to be obtained. This is the virility of The Commons. Through the community, archival material strengthens who and what we are in the global and local communities.

The Commons is virtual: we need to embrace this.

The miracle of all of this is that The Commons is a global entity composed of local forms hosted on a virtual stage (or platform). This platform is Flickr. The platform exists: it is here, it is accessible despite rumors to the contrary, and it is constantly expanding. It expands every time an institution uploads a photo asking, “Where is this? What information do you have to help us identify this event?” and the community responds with rich anecdotal or scientific evidence that does identify the event.

The platform will continue to expand as long as the community contributes to it and the servers are running it.

But the platform, any platform, cannot be beholden or trapped within some one person’s personality. I am a very strong and very opinionated personality. I cannot be defined as the public face of Indicommons or The Commons, depending on which role you choose to view me in. The cult of personality is anathema to The Commons in any form, especially when you take the term at its most base meaning: public. This is very much a public phenomenon, one that is unique; there has never been a project like this hosted anywhere.

Now for two brief stories. The Commons exists not because of one person, but because one institution (the Library of Congress) contacted a social media website (Flickr) and suggested the idea. Of course strong personalities made it happen. But that doesn’t mean that the concept is solely one person’s child to raise by themselves and by themselves alone. Think: Village raising children. Better still, think: Common ground raising information for a global audience by a global network.

My second story is that for months, I carried this blog on my back, then I accepted a job offer which left me no time to blog at any of the five blogs I currently manage, including this one. In fact, a few of the original co-founders of Indicommons are doing other things with their time right now … but there are people in the community who stepped into the vacuum. So, back to the first story: there is a team at Flickr who provide support for The Commons. This team has people, some of whom like the limelight and others who do not, who are passionate, emphatic, opinionated, and in love with The Commons. Any time anyone says anywhere that The Commons is in a state of decay because one person is no longer on the team or there is no team or there is no public face of The Commons is actually backhanding the silent, quiet effort of those whose jobs entail the support of The Commons. Worse, they undermine the vitality of the project.

The Commons is viral and it depends on you.

One only needs to ask, “Does this work for me?”

Does it work for you as an institution that you can post images to The Commons asking, “What is this, please?” and receive commentary on Flickr, Twitter, blogs, email and Facebook and within a matter of hours get data in the form of links to maps or other supporting documentation, personal stories, and metadata that enhances the value of the artifact you uploaded? And from an audience not limited to geeks or scholars but that reaches the masses wherever it is that they choose to hang out on the internet? The viral nature of Flickr itself makes this possible.

Does it work for you as an audience that you have access to the biggest names in Australian, European and American institutions’ archives; content that has previously been locked away behind glass or in a basement or trapped on a glass plate negative? Does it work for you that you can easily step up to the mound with new information to pitch to … The Smithsonian Institution? The Library of Congress? The Nationaal Archief all the way over in The Netherlands?

As a developer, do you like having access to an API and content that you can use to create exciting new places for the internet traveler to enjoy?

Does the viral nature of the internet help this project achieve and exceed its goals?

Then The Commons is very much alive and well, thanks!

I’m very excited to see the new content that will be added to The Commons this year, from both the current institutions and the new ones that are, as you read this, signing contracts and setting up their accounts. My prediction is that 2010 will blow the doors off The Commons so long as people peruse the content, institutions continue uploading and promoting the content, and developers build cool toys that add new dimensions to the content. Do you really need a cult of personality to lead this charge?

No, because The Commons is everyone’s plot of land to sow and reap rewards in. There is no tragedy of The Commons because culture is not a finite resource by virtue of its vital, virile, virtual and viral attributes.

Overlanding, from Powerhouse Museum

In 1968, Garrett Hardin published a seminal treatise on resources and scarcity, The Tragedy of the Commons. In that treatise, whose title is often quoted, Hardin explains that communal areas such as public grazing lands are depleted by self-interested individuals, overgrazing the limited resource and destroying the public good. Hardin uses a Hegelian notion of positive liberty. As Friedrich Engels said, “Freedom is the recognition of necessity“: there is a moral necessity that government regulate public goods, restricting individual liberty for the sake of individual freedom.

However, as far as culture is concerned, the “tragedy” does not, in fact, exist. Culture is not a finite resource.

Greater participation in shared culture enriches that culture; it does not deplete it. Freedom in this digital age includes the ability to have unrestricted access to public goods, which in turn produces more public goods. Laurence Lessig (among other things, founder of the Creative Commons) has explained this phenomenon at a TED conference on the strangling of creativity by protective intellectual property laws. Lessig frames the problem as a war between the read-only culture induced by copyright laws and an emerging read-write culture wherein creativity is democratized by access to and re-use of prior artistic works.

In a book review of Michele Bodrin and David Levine’s “Against Intellectual Monopoly,” Jeffery Tucker writes, “It seems that it might suggest a revision in classical-liberal theory. We have traditionally thought that cooperation and competition were the two pillars of social order; a third could be added: emulation.” Cooperation and competition are at the heart of game theory and of Hardin’s thesis on the commons.

Emulation — the art of imitation — dampens the effect of competition; but in the digital era, what was once a finite resource — public art ensconced within the walls of institutions — becomes an infinite source of material for creative freedom. This opens an entirely new avenue for culture to flourish, as the public repository of artistic works enables greater individual liberty to create new works.

How is emulation in art possible? When works are available with no known copyright restriction so that new derivative works may be created. How is emulation in knowledge possible? By releasing knowledge to as broad an audience as possible, such that new information can be added and compiled to existing libraries. Use, re-use, re-iteration, creation.

The Flickr Commons is truly a commons for the digital era, opening access to public art and increasing public content, both creatively and intellectually. In the opening keynote of the National Digital Forum 2008 Conference, George Oates talked about “Human Traffic, General Public,” noting how “designing for community can help public institutions create digital value, by creating an engaged, conversational and generous community.” Oates says of the success of Flickr as a social media site that people don’t like being told what to do but people do like to feel that they belong. On Flickr you can choose your own adventure and there is a shared community, where one can interactively collaborate with others. Flickr is designed for users to browse and search photographs, has an engaged community and a robust infrastructure for hosting billions of photos, and is international.

The stated mission of Flickr’s Commons is to increase access to public holdings, share information about them, and interact with the institutions and the Internet. It is, indeed, the perfect new commons — a transformation of a limited resource under pressure from the population into an unlimited resource not stressed by a multitude of creative or intellectual access.

Flickr’s Commons is appropriately named. The more institutions that join The Commons, the greater the position for this single point of entry to multiple academic, governmental, or institutional archives — not unlike WorldCat for library holdings: one stop shopping for archived digitized media. Who benefits? Academics, hobbyists, and artists as individuals. But the institutions themselves also benefit through a feedback loop where knowledge and art are accessible to a wide audience that recursively adds their own knowledge back into the fold. Combined, both the public and the individual benefit from The Commons, with no loss or deterioration to either — no freedom has to be sacrificed by one for the other.

Share your thoughts on this unique resource in the comments. Then go through The Commons — and increase the public good.

This is the first in a series of articles from Indicommons authors that explore the philosophy of the Commons and its public benefit.