{ "schemaVersion": 1, "description": "Canonical research questions and follow-on work. Statuses refer to the research, not completion of this website. No investigators or funding commitments are assigned.", "items": [ { "id": "procurement-benefit", "title": "Test collective purchasing benefits", "question": "Does pooled procurement improve price and service after dues, switching costs, and differences in privacy or quality?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Obtain matched individual and collective offers, define comparable service conditions, and preregister net-benefit measures.", "sourceTitles": ["Research program and falsifiable hypotheses", "Business model and economic discipline"] }, { "id": "mandate-comprehension", "title": "Test meaningful permission and refusal", "question": "Do members understand retrieval versus training permissions and successfully exercise refusal, withdrawal, and exit?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Run compensated usability studies with low-risk fictional records and test actual revocation and export workflows.", "sourceTitles": ["Research program and falsifiable hypotheses", "Gmail, private AI, and meaningful opt-in"] }, { "id": "contributor-bargaining", "title": "Measure supplier bargaining gains", "question": "Can collective representation improve contributors' net compensation and enforceable conditions without depending indefinitely on subsidy?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Compare bounded licensing or stewardship offers, full transaction costs, repeat demand, and long-run contributor outcomes; distinguish easy contribution and multiple memberships from lawful sustained bargaining commitments.", "sourceTitles": ["Research program and falsifiable hypotheses", "From digital Costco to a bargaining federation"] }, { "id": "commons-additionality", "title": "Verify additional commons benefits", "question": "Do benefit covenants and funding awards improve maintenance and public access without enclosing open knowledge or merely replacing existing support?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Choose matched open resources and measure additional maintenance, accessibility, steward autonomy, and continued lawful reuse.", "sourceTitles": ["Research program and falsifiable hypotheses", "Creative Commons as an aggregation model"] }, { "id": "supplier-voice", "title": "Test representative club governance", "question": "Can buyer and supplier chambers plus an affected-party council prevent capture while keeping decisions practical and participation accessible?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Rehearse admission, fees, conflicts, data-use changes, deadlock, and exit with compensated participants; record whose decisions change.", "sourceTitles": ["From digital Costco to a bargaining federation", "Research program and falsifiable hypotheses"] }, { "id": "energy-bargaining", "title": "Evaluate infrastructure bargaining", "question": "Can collective procurement and host-community representation measurably reduce externalized energy, water, and ratepayer burdens?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Select a bounded site or procurement case, establish a credible comparison, and fund independent measurement and community review.", "sourceTitles": ["Energy, data centers, and community bargaining", "Research program and falsifiable hypotheses"] }, { "id": "agreement-authority", "title": "Validate a bargaining agreement", "question": "Which representative mandates, contract terms, enforcement resources, and competition-law routes are defensible for the selected participants and jurisdiction?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Compare existing instruments, commission local legal review, track dated litigation and standards, and test a redlined nonbinding framework before any executed pilot.", "sourceTitles": ["Follow-on research: a Commons Collective Framework Agreement", "Regulatory framework: present rules and proposals"] }, { "id": "ranker-validation", "title": "Evaluate contextual reputation and ranking", "question": "Does eligibility-first, task-specific ranking predict successful outcomes while resisting manipulation and giving qualified newcomers fair exposure?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Define held-out evaluations, public component metrics and uncertainty, and test conflicts, fake feedback, version changes, appeals, and funding for a public quality-signal core without pay-to-rank.", "sourceTitles": ["Reputation, validation, and quality ranking"] }, { "id": "commons-credit", "title": "Assess commons-reinvestment credits", "question": "Can capped credits create additional public benefit at an acceptable administrative and fiscal cost without donor control, laundering, or double counting?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Specify the tax base and counterfactual, model forgone treasury revenue, and independently review eligible spending and recipient protections.", "sourceTitles": ["Data dividends, Pigouvian taxes, and commons credits"] }, { "id": "maintained-data-demand", "title": "Test future AI demand", "question": "For a real application, does a governed contributor network outperform open data, direct licensing, or in-house collection on quality-adjusted total cost?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Run a narrow paid pilot, compare held-out outcomes and full costs, and measure renewals, contributor burdens, coverage, and meaningful agency.", "sourceTitles": ["Participation incentives and the future AI data club", "A ninety-day starting sequence"] }, { "id": "node-leverage", "title": "Test what changes each infrastructure bargain", "question": "At each node, which combination of organized demand, credible alternatives, enforceable conditions, and independent evidence changes actual control or benefit allocation?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Select a bounded node and counterparty, document the proposed lever, negotiate a measurable commitment, and test exit, audit, and remedies.", "sourceTitles": ["New knowledge objects and technical architecture"] }, { "id": "federation-pilot", "title": "Validate a minimum viable bargaining institution", "question": "Can a professionally operated Commons Collective Federation secure an enforceable agreement and demonstrable member benefits before taking on unnecessary institutional complexity?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Choose a jurisdiction, compare public bodies and existing unions/collectives with a new federation, fund counsel and enforcement, ratify a capped mandate, and compare credible vendor offers.", "sourceTitles": ["Institution blueprint: a Commons Collective Federation", "From digital Costco to a bargaining federation"] }, { "id": "commons-rl-rewards", "title": "Evaluate commons-authored training objectives", "question": "Can publicly governed rubrics or reward signals improve independently measured model outcomes and collective agency without reward gaming, rights violations, or unrepresentative control?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Preregister a low-risk library-assistant study with baseline, rubric-only, and calibrated reward variants; keep evaluation independent and assess regulatory alternatives separately.", "sourceTitles": ["Commons-authored RL rewards and regulatory design"] }, { "id": "pro-human-stack", "title": "Test the pro-human stack definition", "question": "Can a bounded stack demonstrate useful capability, meaningful refusal, independent challenge, usable exit, fair accounting, and funded remedies across its components?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Specify a task and jurisdiction, document every component's accountability tuple, and independently rehearse permission, failure, complaint, payment, and migration cases.", "sourceTitles": ["A pro-human stack: working definition and test"] }, { "id": "open-agent-adoption", "title": "Compare open and proprietary agent arrangements", "question": "Which combination of harness, model, tools, operating controls, and contracts delivers meaningful agency and accepted-task quality at sustainable full cost?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Complete component passports, apply eligibility gates, compare models under a fixed harness, then test harness differences and an actual supplier switch.", "sourceTitles": ["Open-agent incentives and a Commons Collective Agency Starter Kit", "A pro-human stack: working definition and test"] }, { "id": "private-institution-economics", "title": "Validate the commons service business", "question": "Will real customers renew a maintained service at prices that cover its full costs and commons commitments without enclosing existing open knowledge or using restricted money for losses?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Secure two independent paid pilots, build monthly cash and reserve scenarios, protect contributor liabilities, and test renewal and public-benefit outcomes.", "sourceTitles": ["Private institutions and the commons service model"] }, { "id": "quasi-commons-participation", "title": "Measure contribution and control without conflating populations", "question": "Which interactions actually enter model development, under what authority, and what collective influence or benefit returns are justified compared with governed knowledge commons?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Audit account-specific policy and processing categories, define comparable contributor measures, and test procurement, feedback, and representation mechanisms without cross-platform identity tracking.", "sourceTitles": ["The quasi-commons tension: contribution without control"] }, { "id": "sector-replication", "title": "Validate a sector-specific institutional fork", "question": "Should an existing organization be adapted or federated, or is a new sector collective justified by authority, demand, inclusion, and sustainable stewardship evidence?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Select one sector and jurisdiction, complete the unfilled profile and charter with local evidence, fund independent review, and run the 90-day and 180-day gates.", "sourceTitles": ["Replicable sector collectives: blueprint and templates", "Private institutions and the commons service model"] }, { "id": "workplace-trust-continuity", "title": "Test workplace-data trust continuity", "question": "What lawful authority, confidentiality protections, custody, and successor arrangements could preserve a workplace-data trust's legitimate functions through a firm's sale, closure, or insolvency?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Select a jurisdiction, map employer/worker/third-party and creditor interests, and review contractual and institutional continuity without promising bankruptcy-proof rights.", "sourceTitles": ["Follow-on research: a Commons Collective Framework Agreement", "Gmail, private AI, and meaningful opt-in"] }, { "id": "cross-cmo-appraisal", "title": "Pilot collaboration between collecting organizations", "question": "Can book and music collecting organizations share permission-safe interfaces and appraisal methods while preserving rights, independent decisions, and lawful information exchange?", "status": "open", "nextStep": "Use fictional catalogs for the Alice/Bob case, obtain competition and rights review, distinguish methods from sensitive prices, and test service and allocation responsibilities.", "sourceTitles": ["Alice and Bob: end-to-end flows", "Follow-on research: a Commons Collective Framework Agreement"] } ] }