This paper misrepresent fundamental concepts from Ostrom’s work, which won a Nobel, and fails to contextualize Hardin’s theories. As a 'human resource development' paper it somehow pretends that capitalism doesn't exist?

Hardin coined "The Tragedy of the Commons" in 1968, elaborated on his theory in his 1974 paper "Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor". He was a eugenicist and specifically targeted refugees. He lobbied US Congress in opposition to international famine relief. His evidence-free theories must be contextualized within his overall white-nationalist project. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/garrett-...

The paper asserts that "expertise within a profession" is a commons. As an industry we've never been able to define the specific, task-level role boundaries between PM/designer/engineer across companies. So how is a profession defined? What are the units of expertise here? This paper fails to provide a defensible definition of their commons. Ostrom's commons need clear boundaries and resource units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

From the abstract: "*The paper reframes expertise development as collective stewardship*" which ignores capitalism.

Firms are incentivized to build proprietary expertise, eg Slang at Goldman. Individuals are incentivized to build proprietary expertise and use it as leverage for higher compensation. Even if we fudge commons into a more generic collective action problem, this paper doesn't reckon with the tension between market incentives and collective expertise. This tension comes up again and again, in open source, in academia, and corporate L&D programs.

The author goes on to use professional organizations as an example of governance for their Cognitive Commons. The examples of medicine, law, and engineering are particularly bad as these are credentialed, legally enforced enclosures of expertise, and not self-policing or democratic. They are the opposite of commons.

The author should have just written about expertise as a resource pool and avoided the commons. This was a frustrating read. The paper is a disservice to the commons literature.