PhD defence P.D.J. (Pascal) Carpentier

Summary:

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated the notion of a bundle of rights around ownership of COVID-19 vaccine treatments. Thus, among others, the French president has highlighted the need to decouple private companies’ ownership of COVID-19 vaccines while being highly subsidized by public money from the worldwide population’s right to treatment at an affordable price. Furthermore, with the consequences of the environmental crisis becoming increasingly visible, commons have been highlighted as inspirational governance models for the management of carbon emissions. During the pandemic, individuals spontaneously came together to help healthcare workers. Demand for ventilators, masks, and medical spare parts was extraordinarily high, and supply chains were badly disrupted. These individuals formed Open Source Hardware communities to build what was needed locally. In turn, these communities proposed a novel mode of production that favored collaboration, production, and learning for individuals over the need to maximize profit. However, such an approach represents something of a gray area between “market and state” and is today relevant to a growing number of fields. As technology evolves, the capture of new resources becomes possible, causing social dilemmas, appropriation, congestion, and pollution issues. Commons governance mechanisms offer relevant solutions to these emerging challenges in an ever-increasing number of fields from global health and software and hardware development to outer space.

In this manuscript we focus on the Open Source Hardware movement, an innovative mode of production powered by groups of individuals building highly technical objects, blending software and hardware, and offering an alternative to proprietary innovations. We also spotlight recent members of the commons family—such as Innovation Commons, Knowledge Commons, and Hybrid Commons—to understand how they can best support this movement. Thus, addressing our overarching research question leads us to understand how commons can bring actionable solutions to support the open source movement and foster delivery of complex projects.