VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

In the past few years both commons practitioners and researchers have expressed a growing interest in the potential role of technologies such as digital platforms and distributed ledger technologies in enabling communities to share and manage their joint resources like energy, mobility, gardening, housing etc. The prospect of technologies for managing and governing the commons is considered either with vast optimism or with cautionary criticism. However, so far such claims have mostly remained conceptual and visionary. This paper adds to this body of work by conducting an orientating exploration of how digital platforms might be designed for the governance of the commons. Therefore, this preliminary study examines the literature to determine features and values of resource communities and to learn how technologies might play a role herein through specific affordances and functionalities. These insights lead to the development of an initial design framework that encompasses attributes for constructing community-focused sharing platforms. Then, this framework provides the ground for expanding this study to empirically expose practices and to draw further (design) lessons. To this end, the paper maps real-life experiences of communities using digital platforms for shared mobility in The Netherlands. The findings display the prevalence of a strictly pragmatic setup of existing carsharing platforms to assure seamless transactions. They also reveal the ignorance of embedding features that can facilitate community ethos and collective action. The research identifies future directions for the establishment of commons-oriented sharing platforms by offering a first contribution to a set of emerging design perspectives.