Maintaining the Digital Commons: A Comparison of Debian Linux and Irrigation Canals in Nepal

The consensus among scholars of digital governance is that Ostrom's framework for analyzing closed-access resources is axiomatically too narrow for open-access digital commons such as free and open source software (Benkler, 2011b). Although the framework includes 51 variables for capturing local variability (Ostrom, 2007), they point to the realm of digital resources which are neither as excludable nor as subtractable as physical commons-type resources. The state evidently needs to be far more involved in governing them than Ostrom's framework allows for (Benkler, 2011a). Nevertheless, although the assumptions and conclusions don't apply, Ostrom's careful approach continues to inspire the new research agenda for digital resources (Frischmann, 2014). Hence, there are two immediate questions for the development of a new analytical framework for governing the digital commons. First, which of the old variables – such as the number of users and the economic usefulness of the resource- are still relevant for analyzing user-managed digital resources? Second, which variables pertaining to actors and institutions outside of the community of users are relevant to the framework? Overall, there are orders of magnitude fewer empirical investigations of these questions in the digital realm than in the physical (Mako-Hill, 2015).

A pioneering application of the old framework to a large number of open source projects has identified five variables associated with the continuity of open source projects (Schweik, 2012). But such a direct application cannot remedy the predictable flaws of assuming that human reasoning is easily characterized: it pays scant attention to the specific nature of the tasks required to maintain the resource, and even less to those who do them – assuming instead that all are similar in important behavioral respects. Recent longitudinal work on long-term maintenance of commons-type has suggested that these two aspects be re-examined. In the case of irrigation canals in Nepal, perceived fairness of outcomes becomes more significant to users' commitment to maintenance than most of the other structural variables (Pokharel, 2014).

In this vein, this paper compares the Debian Linux distribution with irrigation systems in Nepal. I ask how similar and different the reasons are that users change their involvement in maintenance and upkeep. For the canals, I rely on fieldwork that I completed in 2013, and for Debian a dataset of modifications, comments and features released by the developers. As a collection of software tools that requires maintenance and upgrading, Debian is an example of digital infrastructure. It is also the common root of most current Linux distributions (the other two roots are RedHat and Slackware). The Nepali irrigation canals are paradigmatic examples of successful Ostromian commons governance. Both types of infrastructure – one digital and the other physical – are user managed. And both are popularly regarded as examples of “the commons.” My comparison supports the view that the specific maintenance tasks and the motivations of contributors for doing them, or not, remain important in the digital realm (Mair et al. 2015). I argue that governing the digital commons requires opening the black box of user-motivations for maintaining, not just creating, digital infrastructure. This will require broadening Ostrom's approach in a fundamental way with respect to work and workers, possibly re-basing the framework on a broader set of behavioral possibilities.

References

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