Paper ID

3101

Paper Type

full

Description

The proliferation of creative work produced and available in a digital commons has enabled a new form of organizing for innovation, solving unmet needs and disseminating those solutions to potential users. One proposed model for leveraging the commons is the private-collective, by which private actors apply their resources to contribute to the commons while simultaneously pursuing self- and other-regarding interests. Here we examine the relationship between provision and appropriation in a particular digital commons, the Thingiverse online repository of free digital objects intended for 3D printing, with sharing and reuse governed by a range of software and Creative Commons licenses. From a dataset of 119,376 digital designs by 38,994 individual designers, we show that the degree of follow-on innovation stimulated by these designs is predicted by the designer’s reuse patterns and the choice of license for a specific design, which together encourage a pattern of reciprocal collaboration with other contributors. From this, we offer implications for the private-collective model and digital innovation.

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Taming Rivalry: Reciprocity in Governing Digital Semi-Commons

The proliferation of creative work produced and available in a digital commons has enabled a new form of organizing for innovation, solving unmet needs and disseminating those solutions to potential users. One proposed model for leveraging the commons is the private-collective, by which private actors apply their resources to contribute to the commons while simultaneously pursuing self- and other-regarding interests. Here we examine the relationship between provision and appropriation in a particular digital commons, the Thingiverse online repository of free digital objects intended for 3D printing, with sharing and reuse governed by a range of software and Creative Commons licenses. From a dataset of 119,376 digital designs by 38,994 individual designers, we show that the degree of follow-on innovation stimulated by these designs is predicted by the designer’s reuse patterns and the choice of license for a specific design, which together encourage a pattern of reciprocal collaboration with other contributors. From this, we offer implications for the private-collective model and digital innovation.