Sending a last reminder as we're finalizing the schedule. Please email us before Sept. 25 for consideration. As one of the organizers, I am very interested in talking to folks interested in AI, the Commons, and Open Weight Models, acknowledging big differences between the three.

Details below:

October 14, 2026

AoIR Preconference: In Defense of the Commons

Workshop facilitators: Zach McDowell, Fenwick McKelvey, Matt Vetter

 

As the Internet becomes just a data dump for the next AI model, there is a growing demand to articulate the loss and what's at stake over the Internet's future. We argue the commons is a critical, normative concept that needs to be reasserted. 

 

Our workshop aims to build capacity in the development of new theory and practice through the The Critical Commons Research Network (CCRN), an international research collective focused on examining the sharing of digital public knowledge through infrastructural, political-economic, policy lenses, and other critical approaches. This network connects researchers, creating opportunities for mentorship and collaboration around the (digital) commons.

The workshop aims to:

1. Coordinate research on Internet commons and other shared services online, including Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, open AI models, and emerging hardware or peer-to-peer server collectives;
2. Advance new theories of the commons as a normative concept for internet studies;
3. Advocate for alternative forms of resistance against new enclosures of the commons through the Critical Commons Network.

 

A key function of the preconference is to coordinate researchers addressing the loss and threats to current Internet commons.

 

We aim to gather 20 to 30 researchers working along themes around the commons for a focused workshop articulating a plan for the network and to coordinate global research on commons theory and practice. We invite participants to submit a brief biography, description of their research project, and relevant publications.

 

The half-day workshop will be organized around three 60-minute thematic discussions developed from participant responses. Selected participants will be invited to give brief lightning talks to animate discussion. We anticipate themes to include:

• Wikipedia: Fondly known as “the last best place on the Internet,” Wikipedia was founded on the utopian promise of a decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary model for creating and sharing “the sum of all human knowledge." Wikipedia remains a shining example of the digital “commons” — repositories of knowledge and information that have become infrastructural layers that support the Internet as we know it. 
• The future of free, libre, and open source collaboration: Beyond Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects, the digital commons also includes open-source software projects (Debian, Pubpub), shadow libraries that circulate publicly funded research, and interoperable interfaces (such as RSS feeds and APIs). These institutional mechanisms for content, whether knowledge, data, multimedia, or code, eschew exclusive traditional property rights in favor of social governance, harnessing diverse, non-market motivations to create shared public goods.
• AI Commons: AI drives new forms of extraction and enclosure of the commons through large language models (LLMs) that repurpose volunteer labor and open data in ways that may undermine the sustainability of the projects themselves. Open models, distributed model interfaces, and agentic-human collaborations function as both an alternative and a threat to growing empires of AI. Can open AI actually mitigate these negative externalities for the commons? 
• Theory and application of “traditional” commons systems (forestry, fisheries, etc) applying towards digital systems.
  
  
  

The discussions will be recorded and collected as a report and included in a forthcoming special issue in communication +1. Whenever possible we will attribute contributions to participants, but participants should expect their contributions to inform these outputs.

 

We encourage critical engagement with commons and commons theory. The ideal of the commons as an open, equitable, and self-regulating space exists under constant pressure, for many reasons. Internally, these projects are not the "mythical egalitarian space" they are often described as. They are characterized by power asymmetries, systemic biases, and complex bureaucracies that can exclude newcomers and marginalized communities who may wish to negotiate and challenge established norms. 

 

Half-day for short workshopping to ensure there is time for networking activities. 

Please submit by September 25th (earlier the better):

1. Your name and affiliation;
2. A 250 biography and/or description of your research program;
3. A 250-word interest statement on your idea that you’d like to develop and discuss

Participants will be selected through a peer-review, and announced soon thereafter.

 

Please send CFP emails to: criticalcommonsresearchnetwork@gmail.com