IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 34

green energy choices. These processes were largely
overlooked in Ostrom's original work, but are essential
to self-determination.
In the article by Hardjono et al., "Social Use Cases
for the ID3 Open Mustard Seed Platform," a new privacy-preserving platform is presented for user-centric
knowledge commons and participatory-sensing applications, where data and information are the shared
common-pool resource. Knowledge commons were
studied by Ostrom and colleagues [3], but this new
platform could provide a route to mass-participation
systems in which the data generators are in control of,
and also the primary beneficiaries of, their own data.
finally, the paper by Miorandi and Maggi, "'Programming' Social Collective Intelligence," uses a
novel game theoretic perspective to examine the
potential for collective action derived from combining social and computational intelligence. This paper
offers, perhaps, an intriguing approach for reconciling
Ostrom's primarily evidence-based fieldwork with the
predictive analytics of game theory, which in the past
might be considered to have generated some conflict.
In seeking to understand how technology can be
used for collective action in socio-technical systems,
we believe that it is necessary to build on, but go
beyond, Ostrom's principles and theories. While she
might possibly have been surprised at some of the
circumstances in which her thinking can be applied,
she would hopefully have been excited by the new

theoretical insights and innovative technological
frameworks inspired by her work - and enthused by
the potential outcomes for successful collective action.

Author Information
Jeremy Pitt is a Reader in Intelligent Systems in the
Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at
Imperial College London.
Ada Diaconescu is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Computing and Networks at Telecom
ParisTech.
David Bollier is an author, activist and scholar focused on the Commons, which he pursues through the
Commons Strategies Group and his blog, Bollier.org.

Acknowledgment
Jeremy Pitt was partially supported by the EU Coordination Action foCAS (fundamentals of Collective
Adaptive Systems), Grant Reference 600572. The editors would particularly like to thank all the reviewers
for their extremely helpful reviews.

References
[1] E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1990.
[2] A. Jones and M. Sergot, "A formal characterisation of institutionalised power," J. IGPL, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 427-443, 1996.
[3] C. Hess and E. Ostrom, Eds. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2006,
pp. 41-82.

Appendix: Ostrom's Institutional Design Principles
The eight design principles are:
Boundaries: who is and is not a member of the institutions should be clearly defined, as are the resources that
are the subject of allocation
Congruence: the rules should be congruent with the prevailing local environments (including the profile of the
members themselves)
Participation: those individuals who are affected by the collective choice arrangements should participate in
their selection
Monitoring: compliance with the rules should be monitored by the members themselves, or by agencies appointed by them
Proportionality: graduated sanctions should ensure that punishment for non-compliance is proportional to the
seriousness of the transgression
Conflicts: the institution should provide fast, efficient and effective recourse to conflict resolution and conflict
prevention mechanisms
Autonomy: whatever rules the members agree to govern their affairs, no external authority can overrule them
System of systems: small local communities "at the edge" should be aggregated into larger systems at larger
scales of interaction

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

fALL 2014

http://www.Bollier.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014