Elinor Ostrom’s work is of interest to those of us in the Architecture Lobby[1] who want architecture to participate in the overthrow of real estate driven, capitalist liberal democracy as well as those members who want to cooperativise architecture firms.[2] What is the role of platforms here? What connections can be made between Ostrom’s work on commons and platforms and architecture? This and the following blog attempt to address this multi-part question and pull coops/commons, platforms, and architecture together.

Ostrom’s later work focuses on her ‘Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework,’ an analytic device developed in the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University and described in her co-edited book, with Charlotte Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. In it, she and Hess describe the IAD framework as ‘a diagnostic tool that can be used to investigate any broad subject where humans repeatedly interact within rules and norms that guide their choice of strategies and behaviours’.[3]

This framework seems well suited to the analysis of resources where new technologies are developing at an extremely rapid pace. New information technologies have redefined knowledge communities; have juggled the traditional world of information users and information providers; have made obsolete many of the existing norms, rules, and laws; and have led to unpredicted outcomes.[4]

IAD, which links micro empirical research to macro questions about system design and institutional policy, has made Ostrom’s work popular with digital theorists exploring information societies, on demand economies, and platform cooperativism from a politico-economic point of view. IAD is an analytic tool, but it also outlines the framework for producing a commons and, by extension, a platform facilitating a commons. The framework highlights the two most essential components of a successful commons – trust and governance. Trust, prior to the IAC work, had always been central to Ostrom’s work. In Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons for Experimental Research, Ostrom emphasises the need, in any commons/cooperative, for an ethic going beyond ‘I’m just here for the extra few bucks’ toward one of ‘what can we do better together?’ While self interest undoubtedly plays a role in any community, no effort that appeals primarily to self interest, she says, is likely to survive. The trust at the base of this practical approach to cooperation and necessary for any successful commons, however, is not based on consensus or traditional democracy; instead, it is found in a ‘deep’ democracy that admits contestation and tension. Nor is trust some exceptional thing that members bring to coops; it is, rather, already at the base of any and all workable economies. Ostrom points out that capitalism itself actually would not function without trust and that corporations, the engines of capitalism, should be seen as a commons with ‘the capacity of individuals to extricate themselves from various types of dilemma situations’ because they ‘vary from situation to situation’.[5]

In the IAD work, trust and information are analysed together and are seen reciprocally. Adequate information and transparency of information ‘may develop increasing trust so that the situation can lead to productive outcomes … All effective governance systems at multiple levels depend on good, trustworthy information about stocks, flows, and processes within the entities being governed, as well as about the relevant external environment.’[6] The information must operate at the level of individual decision making and not operate, as too often happens with large flows of data, at a level of ‘aggregation’ that floats above the issues, people, and context of the association. Information must fit with decision makers’ needs ‘in terms of timing, content, and form of presentation,’ and ‘must not overload the capacity of users to assimilate it.’[7]

Governance is the essential partner to trust in framing a successful commons/cooperative, especially given Ostrom’s belief in ‘deep democracy’s’ embrace of contestation and tension.

The challenge in designing a new governance system is how to use informal strategies for achieving compliance at the beginning that rely on participants’ commitment to a new enterprise, the rules they have designed, and subtle social sanctions. When a more formal system is developed, those who are the monitors and those who impose sanctions must be seen as effective and legitimate by participants, or rule evasion will overwhelm the governance system.[8] Governance is lodged in the institutions that establish the working management systems, the various property rights, and the multiple levels of the ‘rules-in-use’ (as opposed to ‘rules-of-form’) for the individuals concerned. The institutions operate at three levels: operational (individuals interacting with each other and making day-to-day decisions), collective choice (individuals making the rules of operation), and constitutional (individuals determining who must, may, or must not participate in making collective choices).[9] The institutional nature of governance is important. Good will is not assumed, it is regulated: there must be monitors of the processes who are part of or responsible to the members.

The examples of successful open source commons admired by (or would be admired by – she died in 2012) Ostrom are numerous: Linux, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Flickr (photo sharing), the Internet Archive (historical Web artefacts) and Public.Resource.org (government information). People doing music remixes and video mashups have formed their own commons; scientists publish their research in open access journals managed by their disciplines rather than by commercial publishers; archivists devoted to compiling ‘open textbooks’ (Wikibooks) and sharing university course curricula (M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare) are strewn across the Web. There are ‘guerrilla open access’ infrastructures such as AAAAARG.ORG[10], Science Hub, Library Genesis, and, Bivy, a cooperatively managed protocol emerging as a potential competitor to centralised for profit social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.[11]

The formation of a commons and the foregrounding of trust and governance are relevant to the members of the Architecture Lobby (the Lobby, or T-A-L). As a horizontally organised organisation of paying members – who argue for the value of architectural work for the public and within the profession, who reject class based distinctions between architects and constructors, and who reject our role in a capitalist economy – the Lobby foregrounds trust and governance in its organisational framework. We try to model in the organisation the society we promote, our by laws and codes of conduct reflect our acceptance of deep democracy (we call it radical democracy, as per Chantal Mouffe), we have a ‘yes, and’ ethos, and we believe that we architects are knowledge workers. As such, we both accept the reality that architects participate in capitalism’s current incarnation (the knowledge economy) and reject the idea that we are exceptional as either professionals or ‘artists’.

The Lobby has a number of campaigns but paramount are those for cooperativisation (for small firms) and unionisation (for large firms). The ideological conflicts between these has, in fact, led us back to the conflicts between anarchism (coops) and socialism (unions). We are ‘yes, and …’ The cooperative campaign, which seeks to form purchasing, marketing, and worker coops, and is organising a network of cooperatives between the individual coops, combats the competition that capitalism has thrust upon us to guarantee our lack of labour power. While we can’t pretend that this campaign in any way approaches the goals of Ostrom’s commons, either in scale or in type, we can still demonstrate that systems of trust and worker based governance offer better, more satisfying, and more socially just outcomes than competition and self destruction.

As knowledge workers, architects are slow to mobilise apps and platforms, other than those that make construction more efficient and save the developer money…which allows us to compete better for clients who in turn exploit us. The Lobby is only marginally engaged in exploring the non-exploitive aspects of platforms in our cooperative work. We start by scrutinising our approach to and use of platforms in our communications and have initiated a ‘Lobby Platforms Communications Report’,[12] a basic primer describing how the Lobby Platform Committee has approached its digital communications stack. The document begins with the acknowledgement that ‘[t]here is an inherent tension between labour organising and late-capitalism’s shift toward platform based work (Uber, Lyft, etc.) and digital communications’,[13] and admits that we depend on platforms we do not admire but are doing our best to work around – Donorbox, Airtable, Zapier, Mobilize, Slack, Zoom, Mailchimp. Zoho, Google Apps. But we search for those platforms that are worker managed.

But beyond this effort (and the larger one to function as a common), members are working on platforms that bypass the limitations of Scholz’s incomplete and politically unresolved ideas of platform cooperatives based on ownership. They draw instead on (Ostrom’s) ideas of shared membership, platforms which facilitate new forms of architectural collaborative production. We carry hope for platforms that produce not just a better urbanism, but a more democratic playing field.