Publish at December 16 2013 Updated September 17 2025
The website of the Bibliothèque Publique d'Information (BPI) of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, offers a selection of varied resources devoted to this theme, as part of its online dossier on the commons.
The proceedings of the symposium "Les biens communs, comment (co)gérer ce qui est à tous?" held in Brussels in March 2012 offer a general introduction to the notion of "common goods".
This expression popularized in particular by the work of Elinor Ostrom, "Nobel Prize winner in economics", is presented as follows:
"the way in which communities around the world organize themselves to jointly manage natural resources (rivers, forests, etc.). To avoid over-exploitation, communities set themselves standards and rules, and, as they experiment, manage not only to protect their resources sustainably, but also to strengthen the social ties that bind them together". As Valérie Peugeot (Vecam) points out, "in recent years we have also witnessed a theoretical rapprochement between commons communities linked to natural resources and those dedicated to digitizable knowledge", thanks in particular to "the dual impetus of Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, marked by the publication in 2007 of their seminal book Understanding knowledge as a commons".
Among day-to-day "commons" management initiatives is the multilingual collaborative Open Food Facts project, aimed at cataloguing the world's food products. The idea is to collect information (photographs, ingredients, nutritional composition) on the foods we eat every day. Mobile applications available for Android and iOS facilitate this sharing and the addition of new product descriptions, helping to make consumers more informed, which can prove useful at this time of year when agape and festive libations are on the horizon.
The Open Food Facts database (over 12,000 products listed in the French version) is available under the Open Database License. The individual contents of the database can be used under the Database Contents License. Product photographs are available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License. However, they may contain graphic elements subject to copyright.
Sources
Illustration: Stéphane Gigandet,
Official logo of Open Food Facts,
CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia
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