English version here:

There are six challenges that commons-based solutions face in scaling to address global-issues:

1. Scaling up. Growing group size increases the cost of rule setting and enforcement.
2. Cultural diversity. Adds difficulty in coordinating among and between groups over shared resources.
3. Interlinked CPRs. Complicates their management as they become complex systems that require different communities to coordinate.
4. Accelerating rates of change. Complicates the above challenges even further due to the rapid population growth, economic development, mobility of capital and labor, and technological change.
5. The requirement of unanimous agreement. Nation-states are the ones carrying out/enforcing the realization of projects, thus it requires that everybody commits to make a change happen.
6. One world to experiment. Giving us a slim margin for error in seeking alternatives.

The authors divided these challenges into a) Limitations for avoiding depletion of global pool resources (1,2,3), b) Nation-state current way of massive organizing (5), and c) Out of control challenges (4,6).

To understand these challenges we need to first have clarity on what does SCALING mean.

Scaling, according to the authors, have two dimensions.

• Technical. A database where individual contributions, interpersonal interactions, and collective decisions are recorded. It’s goal is handling more workloads with more efficiency.
• Social. Communities relating to a CPR (commoners and stakeholders).

It is important to understand that the popular notion of Scale comes from the technical side, but it is not the only one. Also, that due to the dominance of the Sillicon Valley narrative, scaling has turned mechanical, profit-driven, and logically centralized. This happens also within distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) due to incorporating socio-economic mechanisms for standarization and adoption.

So, on the one hand, scaling up means finding ways to improve throughput capacity of the machines. Most of the times by looking for more powerful machines (associated with more energy expenditure).

Scaling out means distributing workloads over several instances that work on different tasks in parallel. Here is where DLTs come in handy.

Scaling up and out on blockchains, regarding the number of transactions per second, have security and decentralization consequences (a.k.a. the scaling trilemma).

I wont’ go into this, but if you are interested in the matter look for the terms PoW, PoS, PoDS, Sharding, Optimistic rollups, zero-knowledge rollups, and the blockchain trilemma. That is rabbit hole on its own.

On the other hand, scaling the social dimension requires different considerations. Scaling challenges relate to interpersonal trust and socio-economic solidarity factors due to the complexities of social contingencies, i.e., factors and life paths that define the collective’s and individual’s behavior.

Let’s clear out concepts.

Interpersonal trust is what makes social relations thrive. It protects peers from free-riding abuse. However, this applies mostly to small groups, where trust can be consolidated. Scaling trust to larger communities has historically been achieved by establishing a set of rules along with monitoring and enforcing mechanisms.

These rules and mechanisms turn into bureaucracy, thus increasing administrative costs to ensure socio-economic solidarity.

Now, considering the above-mentioned points about technical and social scaling, how might the commons scale?

With DLTs, smart contracts act as automatically self-enforced rules, reducing the administrative costs and with it the need of a bureaucratic class that could turn into an elite.

Tokenizing recorded contributions and making them transparent enables protection against free-riders while optimizing the public understanding of what needs to get done for both governance and operations.

Lastly, decentralization of power through DAOs enables participants to control both shared resources and the path the community/product/commons takes.

Sounds good, but what about the technical scaling? Well, it is important to understand that commons are not made/meant to scale infinitely. They have defined boundaries.

Commons provide a concrete use-value to specific recipients, being these the immediate “natural” boundary. Commons are maintained when they provide a clear and direct “value” to its recipients.

The technical dimension within the commons perspective takes another path. This path is called Federated scaling. How is it different?

The authors outstand federated scaling by comparing it to the monolithic perspective from Silicon Valley. Federated scaling aims for diversity, resiliency, and collaboration over dominance.

Federated scaling is the process of integrating different forms of collective acting into a framework that allows collectives to collaborate while acknowledging their inter-relations and differences. Federated scaling accounts contributions through shared expressions of value and structures of mutual stake-holding.

Think of MetaGame and The Commons Stack. Both have developed their own accounting contribution systems. The first an algorithmic accounting system with emojis and direct participations in specific channels such as written inputs within chat channels and forum posts. The latter, a system similar to stand-up meetings where praise is given and there are people giving subjective values to that praise.

MGamers hold and use the GIV token, and The Commons Stack holds SEED tokens. It could be said that if these two organizations would like to collaborate in scaling a solution, they are potentially ready to do so if they would use both systems to account for their contributions and use their tokens to vote on a joint venture, like it could be holding a common team for administrative tasks such as recruiting.

Now, imagine what could happen if a group of orgs set on a common cause using these accounting contribution frameworks and mutual stake-holding for reaching a goal? The proposal inverter is a tool that allows putting funds into a shared cause. Employing a federated scaling framework with a proposal inverter enables multiple dOrgs to break their limitations and solve the scaling challenge.

However, if one would like to scale this further, another obstacle appears: the logic of value. Value to the commons is unique to the context of the use-value, value to the capitalists is based on equivalence of a thing to a monetary number.

Monetary equivalence vs use-value is a topic that I’ll later dive in.

What happens to the rest of the challenges previously identified? Well, they are not yet addressed by the authors, so you and me, can contribute on researching, ideating, testing, modeling, monitoring and sharing potential solutions for addressing each of the six challenges.

Check MetaGame and The Commons Stack to learn more. Check the Crypto-Commons Hub to learn more and engage on scientific and informal experimentations on these topics.