Mashing Up a Commons (Linux Journal)
Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet? Or at least not a complete one? That's what occurred to me last Sunday night, as Claus Dahl and I sat talking in a smoky Copenhagen bistro. The subject was public spaces. Europeans have a deep appreciation of them. Even in relatively chilly Denmark, there are plenty of outdoor cafés. Narrow streets in the older quarters join in public plazas as big as football fields. We also talked about how Americans seem to have a correspondingly elevated sense of private matters. Private enterprise, for example. Perhaps, Claus suggested, that's why the Net was commercialized first in the U.S."
