Who decides on commons usage?

It might sound a bit strange, but: Who decides, who may use a common means? So far we agreed, that this should be handled in a social process. That’s quite vague. :slight_smile:

Imagine there’s a foundation like the Munus Stiftung. The foundation itself doesn’t want to do any work (or at least as little as possible). It just owns land on a legal basis. The land is donated to the foundation.

The second thing to do: Give user contracts to people using the land. The foundation doesn’t want to decide to whom a contract may be given. It just wants to sign the contract – a contract, in which everyone whom it might concern, agreed on.

So again:

  1. Which people agree in
  2. what manner on
  3. which contract?

First of all - just to make sure, we are talking about the same -, I think this is not a software-related question, but a question how to organize commons in general. The software supports commoning, it doesn’t frame it. The social process has to be vague while concepting the software, because the software “does not know” anything about the discussions/circumstances/rule-making outside the software-mediation. The software users do not have specific rights to set the purpose of means. The software algorithm can make proposals how a mean could be used effectively (within the borders of the information it has) and software users can take part in the rule-making just like every other peer can.

So from a software-perspective my answers to the three questions would be: we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know. And we can’t know it.

I think the relevant questions are at the beginning:

  1. How can we support the social process over the use of a mean a) between software-users and b) between software-users and non-software-users.
  2. How can we support the process, that the result of those discussions gets transfered in a software-readable way?

And independent from the software we have to support developments like the Munus-Stiftung, because we as Commoners (not as software-users/developers) need legal structures to use means as commons.

And as a Commoner I think ‘creative-commons-like material-commons-licences’ are part of the answer of the three questions.