Design Principles for the Commons

In governing the Commons, Ostrom also identified eight basic design principles that enable commons to work reliably:

• A commons must have clearly defined boundaries of membership and of the resource, for example.
• People must be able to develop their own rules for managing the resource, for another.
• They must be able to devise systems to monitor how people use the resource and identify and punish people who violate the rules.

And so on.

- David Bollier