The commons is a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest. Studies on the commons include the information commons with issues about public knowledge, the public domain, open science, and the free exchange of ideas -- all issues at the core of a direct democracy. See Information and Knowledge Commons Links for other approaches to the commons.

Common-pool resources(CPRs) are natural or human-made resources where one person's use subtracts from another's use and where it is often necessary, but difficult and costly, to exclude other users outside the group from using the resource.. The majority of the CPR research to date has been in the areas of fisheries, forests, grazing systems, wildlife, water resources, irrigation systems, agriculture, land tenure and use, social organization, theory (social dilemmas, game theory, experimental economics, etc.), and global commons (climate change, air pollution, transboundary disputes, etc.). There is a growing corpus of work on "new" or "nontraditional" commons, which focuses on urban commons (apartment buildings, parking spaces, playgrounds, etc.), the Internet, electro-magnetic spectrum, genetic data, budgets, etc.

Common property is a formal or informal property regime that allocates a bundle of rights to a group. Such rights may include ownership, management, use, exclusion, access of a shared resource.

-C. Hess
October 2006