To reclaim the idea of education as polis is to see teaching and learning not as private exchanges but as public acts of care, responsibility, and world-making. In Hannah Arendt’s sense, the polis is a “space of appearance,” a realm where individuals come together to speak and act, to deliberate and take responsibility for the shared world they inhabit (Arendt 2018). Education, viewed through this lens, is neither a service nor a delivery mechanism. It is the ongoing work of sustaining a common world, an arena where plurality and judgment are exercised, and where each generation renews its relationship to knowledge, culture, and the social imagination.

This view draws also on Cornelius Castoriadis’s distinction between the instituted (the durable norms and structures of a society) and the instituting, the radical capacity of people to question and recreate those structures (Castoriadis 1997). Education becomes a vital site of this instituting activity: a space where collective autonomy can be exercised, where learners and educators participate in shaping not only knowledge but also the conditions under which knowledge is created and shared. In that sense, pedagogy is not only ethical and relational, but also political, a practice of freedom oriented toward the renewal of the common good (Biesta 2013).

Earlier posts in this series explored how digital platforms structure and constrain that freedom. The architecture of learning management systems, data dashboards, and AI tutors often embeds imaginaries of efficiency, measurement, and control. As Ben Williamson (2017) shows, data-driven infrastructures do not simply record learning; they shape it, translating educational judgment into metrics and dashboards. Similarly, Shoshana Zuboff (2019) and Nick Srnicek (2017) trace how platform capitalism thrives by turning interaction into data, enclosing what might otherwise be shared. These logics, carried into education, risk eroding the dialogic and uncertain qualities of teaching, narrowing the possibilities for imagination and genuine encounter.

Resisting such tendencies requires more than critique. It calls for constructing new spaces and practices that embody different imaginaries. This post turns, therefore, to the idea of building commons, a practical expression of education as polis. Commons are not merely collections of shared resources; they are social and technical infrastructures maintained through collective stewardship, negotiation, and care. In education, this may take the form of open repositories, federated platforms, or peer networks that prioritise transparency, reciprocity, and sustainability over extraction or enclosure (Ostrom 2015; Bollier 2014).

To build digital commons is to embed the imaginary of the common good into the very fabric of our technological systems. It means designing platforms and policies that sustain dialogue rather than capture attention; infrastructures that distribute agency rather than concentrate control. Such an orientation reframes pedagogy as both practice and politics, a means by which educators collectively enact autonomy within the architectures that shape their work.

In what follows, the focus shifts from resisting platform logics to enacting alternatives: cultivating shared infrastructures, governance models, and communities that renew education’s public purpose. To build commons is to keep faith with the promise of education as polis, an unfinished, collaborative project of making the world together.

The common good in education is often spoken of as if it were simply a matter of extending access, making learning resources or technologies available to all. Yet this narrow view mistakes the form for the substance. The common good is not a state of distribution but a living, relational practice: a commitment to co-governance, dialogue, and mutual responsibility. It is through these relationships that education becomes a shared project rather than a service. As Gert Biesta (2010) reminds us, the value of education lies not in the efficient production of measurable outcomes but in cultivating subjectivity, responsibility, and freedom within a shared world. The good of education is thus not something to be owned or delivered, but something we continually enact together.

Cornelius Castoriadis helps us to see why this is so. For him, societies are not fixed orders but self-instituting projects, grounded in the social imaginary (the shared framework through which people make sense of meaning, value, and possibility (Castoriadis 1997). Imaginaries are not illusions; they are the generative horizons that make collective life intelligible. The imaginary of the common good therefore names a horizon in which education is oriented toward openness, reciprocity, and shared world-making. When educators design curricula, infrastructures, or policies within this imaginary, they participate in the ongoing process of collective autonomy) the capacity to imagine and recreate the institutions that shape our lives.

Hannah Arendt (2018) offers a complementary perspective. She describes the world as a space of appearance, a fragile realm that exists only when people come together to speak and act in concert. This world “lies between people” (sustained by the plurality of those who inhabit it. Education, in this sense, is the practice through which we sustain and renew that shared world. Arendt’s plurality and Castoriadis’s autonomy meet in this insight: both affirm the human capacity to create new beginnings, to act collectively in ways that preserve freedom while acknowledging interdependence. The common good thus depends not on consensus but on our willingness to inhabit the tensions of plurality) to deliberate, to disagree, and to remain in relation.

In a digital age, this imaginary demands a rethinking of the infrastructures through which education is organised. If platforms, repositories, and analytic systems are treated as neutral delivery tools, their social and political dimensions are obscured. As Andrew Feenberg (2002) argues, technologies always embody the values and power relations of their design. Brett Frischmann (2012) extends this to show that infrastructures derive their social value precisely from shared use and stewardship. Digital infrastructures, then, are not merely technical artefacts but social institutions: they can either reproduce hierarchies or sustain commons-like practices of co-creation and care. Examples such as federated platforms like MoodleNet, open repositories maintained by educator communities, and peer-governed H5P hubs demonstrate that digital systems can be structured around transparency, collaboration, and reciprocity rather than enclosure.

To orient educational design toward the imaginary of the common good is therefore to treat openness as an ethic of participation rather than a policy of access. It invites educators to see their digital environments as social contracts (to ask who governs, who maintains, and who benefits. In doing so, it reframes pedagogy as both ethical and political work: the cultivation of spaces where collective agency and mutual responsibility can flourish. The commons is not a destination but a practice) one that must be continually sustained, revised, and re-imagined. To build education as a commons is to build the world we share, again and again, through our actions with one another.

The movement toward openness in education has transformed how knowledge is created and shared, yet it remains incomplete. Open access and Open Educational Resources (OER) have widened participation and reduced barriers, but they often remain bound by a transactional logic: knowledge as a product to be delivered rather than a relationship to be sustained. Commoning reimagines this premise. It shifts the focus from distribution to stewardship, the shared governance of resources, infrastructures, and social practices. As Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (2007) argue, commons are “shared resource systems” maintained through norms of participation, trust, and reciprocity rather than ownership or market exchange. In this sense, the commons is less an object than a verb: a living process of collective care that transforms openness into a sustained social practice.

While Ostrom’s framework originated in the study of natural resource management, its insights apply powerfully to digital and educational ecosystems. The resource here is not finite, but it still depends on shared norms and governance to prevent neglect or enclosure. Knowledge infrastructures (repositories, platforms, and networks) require continuous maintenance, participation, and ethical oversight. As David Bollier (2014) observes, commons endure only when communities accept responsibility for their reproduction. In education, this transforms openness from a policy of release into an ethic of shared responsibility, where access is inseparable from participation.

The distinction between openness and commoning is therefore not semantic but structural. Open access may remove barriers, but it does not inherently address how resources are governed, who participates, or whose labour sustains them. Commons-based approaches foreground these questions by linking openness with co-governance and mutual aid. As Martin Weller (2014) notes, openness attains its transformative potential only when it becomes participatory, when educators and learners co-create not just artefacts, but the institutional and cultural conditions that support sharing. This relational orientation moves openness beyond transparency toward agency, making educators not mere users of systems but co-stewards of their infrastructures.

Educational commons already exist in diverse forms. The OER movement, exemplified by initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare and UNESCO’s OER declarations, represents an important foundation in democratising access. Yet as Stephen Downes (2007) and Catherine Cronin (2017) argue, openness achieves its real potential when it fosters networks of co-creation, adaptation, and ongoing dialogue. Federated learning platforms such as MoodleNet and experimental initiatives like FediLMS (a pattern that my own OpenLearn Commons project seeks to exemplify) extend this principle by decentralising control. They enable individuals or institutions to host their own nodes while remaining interconnected through shared protocols, modelling autonomy without isolation: a network of commons bound by mutual recognition rather than central authority.

Similarly, collaborative content hubs such as H5P repositories illustrate how educators can collectively design, share, and revise interactive materials within open ecosystems. Peer-to-peer knowledge networks (from WikiEducator and ScholarLed to smaller community wikis) sustain co-authorship and mutual aid across institutional boundaries. These spaces exemplify what Peter Linebaugh (2008) calls “commoning”: the social activity through which the commons itself is renewed. Each contribution, revision, or act of moderation strengthens the collective capacity for shared learning and care. Through such acts, digital pedagogy becomes not merely a practice of sharing, but an exercise in co-determination and ethical interdependence.

The shift from open resources to digital commons therefore marks a deeper transformation in educational culture. It asks educators to move from access to agency, from dissemination to participation, from policy to practice. To build digital commons is to embed autonomy, collaboration, and care into the infrastructures of learning themselves, to cultivate the habits of co-creation that sustain the world we hold in common.

Building digital commons is less about releasing artefacts and more about cultivating sustainable social practices that embed autonomy, reciprocity, and care into everyday educational life. Four interdependent domains are particularly actionable for educators and institutions: licensing, governance, moderation-and-care, and sustainability.

Licensing

Licensing shapes the moral and practical boundaries of sharing. Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) and Attribution–ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licences remove most barriers while ensuring credit and reciprocity, allowing derivative works to remain open and cumulative (Creative Commons n.d.; Creative Commons 2013). For software or data projects, equivalent licences such as MIT, GPL, or ODbL extend these principles into educational infrastructure and research contexts. When materials cannot be fully opened due to confidentiality or third-party rights, educators can still provide “open proxies” (template versions, sample datasets, or design frameworks) that preserve the spirit of reuse and adaptation. In this way, licensing becomes a form of stewardship, not merely compliance.

Governance

Commons cannot endure without transparent and participatory forms of governance. Elinor Ostrom’s design principles (clearly defined boundaries, collective decision-making, monitoring, and locally adapted rules) remain vital for sustaining shared systems (Ostrom 1990; Hess and Ostrom 2007). Educational platforms can apply these principles by maintaining lightweight governance charters, open contribution pathways, and visible records of decisions. In federated contexts such as MoodleNet or FediLMS, communities can align local policies while remaining interoperable through open standards like ActivityPub (W3C 2018). This model balances autonomy with connection, allowing educators to participate in a wider ecosystem without surrendering control to centralised authorities.

Moderation and care

Digital commons thrive only where inclusion, safety, and respect are cultivated. Codes of conduct, such as the Contributor Covenant (2014–), provide shared expectations and accountability while helping distribute the labour of moderation. Rotating moderators, peer mentoring, and community onboarding prevent gatekeeping and burnout. Crucially, moderation is not merely technical oversight but pedagogical work: it models deliberation, empathy, and pluralism, the conditions through which collective agency becomes possible. Attention to equity and representation ensures that openness does not replicate dominant voices (hooks 1994; Noble 2018). Commoning thus becomes an ethical practice of maintaining the “space of appearance” where all participants can act and be heard.

Sustainability

Commons tend to erode not through overuse but through neglect. Sustainable commoning requires time, recognition, and maintenance. As Nadia Eghbal (2016) and Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell (2020) argue, the health of digital infrastructures depends on invisible labour: versioning, documentation, accessibility checks, and dependency updates. Institutions can support this work by recognising maintenance within workload models, creating micro-credentials for contributors, and embedding commons stewardship into professional development. Federated provisioning (departmental or faculty-level repositories rather than single mega-instances) distributes responsibility and keeps communities close to their tools (Bollier and Helfrich 2019). Sustainability is ultimately an ethic of care: the daily labour of tending, repairing, and renewing the shared infrastructures that sustain educational freedom.

Simple, actionable starters

• Create a departmental OER commons: a shared repository with a concise governance charter, CC BY or CC BY-SA licensing, and a quarterly review cycle.
• Launch a co-maintained activity library (e.g., H5P) with templated metadata, accessibility checks, and a “request-adopt-retire” workflow.
• Run an annual stewardship sprint to update metadata, verify licences, and improve discoverability.
• Pilot a federated server for a programme or school with published moderation policies and interoperability standards.
• Embed recognition mechanisms: include commons stewardship in role profiles, credit frameworks, and promotion criteria to ensure that care work is valued.

By integrating licensing, governance, moderation, and maintenance as everyday practices, educators transform openness from a policy into a lived ethic. Commoning, in this sense, is not peripheral to pedagogy but its sustaining infrastructure, the quiet work through which educational communities remain free, inclusive, and alive.

Commoning within universities collides with institutional systems built for competition, ownership, and compliance. Funding logics reward proprietary advantage and measurable innovation, privileging projects that can be branded, commercialised, or ranked over those that cultivate shared infrastructures and relationships of care. Short-term project cycles and performance-based allocations favour novelty rather than continuity, rewarding innovation over maintenance, metrics over meaning. This dynamic mirrors what Nick Srnicek (2017) describes in the platform economy: value is extracted through enclosure and data capture rather than collective benefit, while the slower, sustaining work of commoning remains invisible. Within universities, procurement contracts, intellectual-property rules, and risk management frameworks reproduce these logics, narrowing the space for collaborative stewardship.

Labour that maintains the commons (versioning, documentation, onboarding, accessibility, and moderation) is rarely visible in workload models or promotion frameworks, even though such maintenance underpins institutional sustainability (Eghbal 2016; Vinsel and Russell 2020). In the digital university, care work too often becomes background noise: essential but unrecognised, moralised but not rewarded. Technical and policy constraints exacerbate this invisibility. Centralised architectures and risk-averse interpretations of data-protection laws can inhibit federation, interoperability, and local autonomy. As Ben Williamson (2017) shows, data governance and learning analytics are increasingly shaped by logics of control, risk, and reputational management. Meanwhile, institutional branding and compliance frameworks (from visual-identity standards to intellectual-property restrictions) can conflict with open licensing and community governance, even as policy discourses such as UNESCO’s (2019) Draft Recommendation on OER advocate openness as a public good.

Responding to these challenges requires coupling principled critique with pragmatic institutional strategies. Partnerships are essential: libraries, digital learning units, and research IT can co-own commons initiatives, integrating openness, accessibility, and security as shared design values rather than trade-offs. Procurement and legal teams can work toward federation-ready contracts, ensuring that open standards, data portability, and self-hosting options are part of tender requirements. Advocacy must address recognition. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA 2012) and the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al. 2015) call for reward systems that value public contribution and collaboration. Embedding these principles in teaching and service evaluation allows stewardship, moderation, and co-authorship to count as legitimate forms of academic labour. Institutional storytelling plays a complementary role: highlighting the invisible labour of maintenance (contributions merged, accessibility fixes deployed, repositories curated) reframes care and collaboration as collective achievements rather than individual exceptions. These narratives challenge the innovation fetish that privileges newness over continuity and help leadership see maintenance as mission-critical rather than marginal (Eghbal 2016; Vinsel and Russell 2020).

Aligning governance with the ethos of the commons requires structural as well as cultural change. Universities can adopt default-open licensing for teaching materials, with clear exceptions and “open proxy” models where full openness is impossible. Federated-by-design architectures, such as modular repositories or interoperable departmental servers, can distribute ownership and encourage local governance while maintaining connection through open standards like ActivityPub (W3C 2018). Participatory governance structures should include educators, students, and professional services in defining rules for contribution, moderation, and attribution (Hess and Ostrom 2007; Bollier and Helfrich 2019). Crucially, institutions must link openness with care, equity, and accessibility, ensuring that commoning does not reproduce the exclusions it seeks to overcome (hooks 1994; Noble 2018). Reimagining institutional culture around commoning means revaluing care, not as emotional surplus but as the infrastructural work of keeping systems, relationships, and communities alive.

Universities that reorient funding, evaluation, and governance toward the commons do more than open resources; they renew education’s public purpose. By aligning incentives and architectures with reciprocity, maintenance, and shared responsibility, they move beyond compliance-driven control to create conditions in which collective agency and care can endure.

Commoning, as explored throughout this post, is both a practice and a politics - a way of reimagining collective agency within digital systems increasingly structured around enclosure, extraction, and control. It contests the dominant imaginaries of efficiency and ownership by foregrounding autonomy, reciprocity, and care. To common is to act as if the world can still be shaped collectively, even within architectures that appear to foreclose it. This is a radical stance, not because it rejects institutions or technology, but because it insists that both can be reconfigured toward shared purposes. In this sense, commoning is an act of democratic imagination: it expands what is possible within existing infrastructures, transforming spaces of constraint into sites of creativity and co-governance. It is also a temporal practice, sustaining the slow, continuous work of renewal that allows learning and collaboration to unfold over time.

Democracy, in this view, is not a procedural abstraction but a lived practice of mutual world-building. Drawing on Hannah Arendt (2018), the commons can be seen as a digital space of appearance: a realm where educators and learners act, speak, and deliberate in plurality. Through commoning, this space remains open to renewal; it becomes a form of natality, a capacity to begin again in shared responsibility for the world. Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) extends this horizon by describing autonomy not as personal freedom but as the collective capacity to question and remake institutions. When educators common digital infrastructures (through shared governance, co-authorship, or open licensing) they exercise precisely this collective autonomy. Commoning thus links imagination and action: it is where the ethical and the institutional meet, where digital practice becomes a form of democratic renewal.

This work of renewal acquires particular urgency in the contemporary university, where platform governance, data analytics, and performance metrics delimit the possibilities of agency. As Shoshana Zuboff (2019) and Ben Williamson (2017) show, data-driven infrastructures increasingly translate teaching and learning into systems of surveillance, optimisation, and prediction. Against this backdrop, the commons offers a counter-imaginary: a practice of resistance and recreation that keeps education accountable to human judgment and the public good. To build commons is not to withdraw from institutions but to inhabit them differently, to weave transparency, care, and shared maintenance into their architectures. Such gestures, as Bollier and Helfrich (2019) suggest, are insurgent and generative at once: they reclaim governance and value from the margins and show that cooperation can flourish even within systems designed for competition.

To common, then, is to begin from where we are, to treat every act of sharing, co-creation, or mutual support as a quiet assertion of the world we wish to sustain. The commons grows through gestures of maintenance and relation, through the everyday labour of educators who make openness and care tangible. Systems endure not through automation but through the slow, attentive work of people who keep them alive. The next post in this series turns to how such practices of commoning depend not only on infrastructure, but on time and care. It asks how digital environments might be designed for slowness, reflection, and inclusion; how infrastructures could nurture wellbeing and relational attention rather than acceleration and efficiency. If commoning is about sustaining shared worlds, then care is the rhythm that keeps those worlds alive. For now, the invitation is simple: to keep building together, to recognise that in every collaborative act we are rehearsing the world we hope to inhabit. The commons, like education itself, endures only through our shared labour, attention, and imagination.

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