It might have caught your attention several weeks back when professor Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University was announced as a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, alongside Berkeley’s Oliver E. Williamson, for her work in economic governance and the organization of cooperation. It was pretty awesome that she was the first female laureate in the 40 year history, but what was more meaningful was the work for which she was rewarded. As one of her interviewers summed it up:

Elinor’s cooperation theories have the potential “to catch the public imagination… people getting involved in their own governance.”

The Tragedy of the Commons, the over-exploitation of common resources, was a concept introduced back in 1968, by Garrett Hardin. It’s an idea that has become pretty ingrained, in my generation at least, and has been thought to have only been remedied by privatization or government control. What Elinor found, through her numerous empirical studies of natural-resource management, turned this “Tragedy” on its head. Whether Mongolian grasslands or Nepalese dams, success did not come when modern government or private institutions took control. Rather, these resources were most abundant and vital when the users cooperated according to the subtle and sometimes ancient rules that had evolved over time, Elinor found that rarely is there a “Tragedy”, but rather that common property is often surprisingly well managed when left to the people. What Hardin’s theory lacked was a user perspective, and it consequently discounted that “users themselves can both create and enforce rules that mitigate over-exploitation.”

Elinor’s theories have sparked my imagination, to take a look at how I interact in the digital commons, and also at KA+A’s user experience work to design interactions for online communities such as Bigger Africa, ChaCha’s Guide Community, and ExactTarget’s 3Sixty. All of these online communities look a bit differently than the grasslands and water reservoirs, but they still offer a common space and pools of resources to be used by a large group of people. And, even more striking, they suffer if users simply take information without replenishing them with new or updated information. This familiar give and take cycle, is exactly what Elinor’s studies revolved around, and what she proposed could be managed by the users if they have some role in structuring the cooperation. She proposed several design principles for how these common pools (communities in our case) can achieve the best outcomes:

• rules should clearly define who has what entitlement.
• adequate conflict resolution mechanisms should be in place.
• an individual’s duty to maintain the resource should stand in reasonable proportion to the benefits.
• monitoring and sanctioning should be carried out either by the users themselves or by someone who is accountable to the users.
• sanctions should be graduated, mild for a first violation and stricter as violations are repeated.
• governance is more successful when decision processes are democratic, in the sense that a majority of users are allowed to participate in the modification of the rules.
• the right of users to self-organize is clearly recognized by outside authorities.

NobelPrize.org

Just seeing a hint of the relationship between these design principles, and our own user centered design approach for creating successful online communities is a pretty exciting manifestation of Elinor’s work, and true expression of her interdisciplinary thinking. There’s no doubt that her work will catch the public imagination of a people interested in their own governance, and hopefully shape a more responsible relationship with the online environment.