Spanning institutions, relationships, and capability: a national foundation?

We don’t wish at this stage to get any more prescriptive than we already have.

The ideas here are presented to illustrate the kinds of institutional arrangement that are in keeping with the design principles of the commons. There will probably be some kind of “commons foundation” whose job is to support the commons community and build an inclusive process for curating and maintaining the standards and protocols.

This will likely be a non-aligned not-for-profit that administers the community standards in the same way a market regulator would do – except we recommend that it is constituted by a wide range of interested parties and not governed or captured by narrow or extractive interests or interests non-aligned with the commons community – interests that would be coercive and exclusive.

This institution also needs to have expertise in facilitating bottom-up groups of interested parties to define their own local metadata standards, as well asbeing able to facilitate a broad bandwidth discussion at the community level about commons-level protocols.