For many years, the Workshop has facilitated the establishment of self-organized working groups. Most groups are mechanisms enabling people who share common interests to discuss their current research and benefit from each other’s commentary and criticism. Some groups are focused on a particular research question and have resulted in a published paper, a research design, a research proposal, or some other joint product.
In the past we have had working groups on:
Experimental Methods
History and Philosophy of Science Reading Group
Interdisciplinary Multi-method Research
Program in Institutional Analysis for Social-Ecological Systems (PIASES); Integrating Ecological Perspectives with the Social-Ecological Systems Framework (SES) and
A dissertation Research Group
If you have suggestions for a new working group, contact Assistant Director Anna Goodman.
Support for Working Groups
The Ostrom Workshop seeks to provide added support for working groups. Funds are intended to support the furtherance of the group’s research activities by covering expenses such as pilot studies, publication fees, and fieldwork. Working groups based at Indiana University-Bloomington and meeting at the Workshop can claim reasonable expenses for catering costs. International working groups that have an interest in partnering with an IU Global Gateway to host a regional convening should contact Assistant Director Anna Goodman, who can get them in touch with Gateway representatives and assist with requests for matching funds alongside Ostrom Workshop grants coordinator Emily Castle.
PROCESS
Fill out and submit the Working Group Funding Request form. The turnaround time for the review process is 30 days. There are two tiers of review. The first tier for up to $500 in catering expenses will be handled by Ostrom Workshop staff. The second tier will be applications over $500, with a ceiling of $5,000, which will be reviewed by the Funding Committee. Proposals may be fully or partially funded to provide support for multiple groups, at the discretion of the committee.
Active Working Groups
Even though Bitcoin gets most of the press, the underlying tech, blockchain, is the bigger story; simply put, according to Goldman Sachs, it could “change ‘everything.’”
Indeed, the tech is sometimes billed as a panacea—from making businesses more efficient to engendering the growth of “smart” contracts and even securing medical devices, blockchain is now being investigated by a huge range of organizations and is attracting billions in venture funding. Interest is widespread, with organizations ranging from DARPA to Disney investing in blockchain. Wal-Mart is similarly deploying it to help manage its massive supply chain.
Countries are even getting into the game, from launching their own cryptocurrencies like Venezuela’s Petro, to Honduras and Greece using blockchain to aid in land registries, to its use in secure voting. But, as with every new innovation, there are both opportunities and drawbacks to consider.
The Ostrom Workshop is taking on the challenge of blockchain governance with a new collaborative initiative—the Blockchain Governance Initiative (BGI)—that will be a partnership between our Cybersecurity and Data Governance Programs.
To join our working group, and learn more about blockchain research going on around IU, please sign up for our dedicated blockchain mailing list.
The Climate Governance working group is a forum to discuss research, curricular, and policy initiatives at IU that are related to climate governance. We hope to bring people together around the topic of climate governance, and through a round table and follow on conversations, to facilitate smaller, more focused working groups to build out specific collaborative projects.
If you are interested in joining this group, please contact Jessica Steinberg.
Many creators—artists, chefs, designers, musicians, and writers, among others—look and listen to prior works for inspiration. Under the law, the crucial inquiry is whether the source of the inspiration has been transformed sufficiently so that the new design can be considered “original” rather than “derived.” Such an inquiry also has ramifications for creative artifacts that lie outside the law. This Data Management and Information Governance Working Group will examine creative expression in the digital world, with an eye toward using the Ostrom Frameworks.
In many ways, cyber insecurity has never been more pronounced. Hackers have launched attacks on cities such as Atlanta, probed the U.S. power grid, and even tried to compromise our democratic system. Research firm Cybersecurity Ventures projects that global losses from cybercrimes could well hit $6 trillion a year by 2021, while Gartner Inc. forecasts that worldwide spending on cybersecurity will exceed $124 billion in 2019.
But instead of more handwringing or new software patches, what is needed is a new, more proactive approach to cybersecurity that addresses concrete vulnerabilities, helps us better understand how the cyber threat is developing, and strengthen global public- and private-sector defenses to more effectively manage cyber attacks and secure some measure of cyber peace. Yet, to date, there have been relatively few efforts aimed at defining and understanding the goal of "cyber peace."
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency specializing in information and communication technologies, pioneered some of the early work in the field, as did the World Federation of Scientists and the Vatican, but too often cyber peace is viewed as a negative, e.g., the end of cyberattacks. Although certainly desirable, such an outcome is politically and technically unlikely, at least in the near term. Instead, what might a positive cyber peace look like, and how might we get there? At the end of the day, what is the best we can hope for in terms of "peace" on the internet?
Building from the Cyber Peace Alliance that the Ostrom Workshop Cybersecurity and Internet Governance Program built with nonprofit foundations, including the Cyber Peace Foundation, we are formalizing a Cyber Peace Working Group to help advance the field.
If you have an interest in peacebuilding both online and offline and are interested in getting involved in this effort, please do so by signing up.
Public Health is responsible for doubling lifespans in the 20th century because it focused attention on a simple question: why do people die? Of course, it’s more complex than that, involves addressing the reasons, and more. Complementing medicine’s attention to individual health with attention to the health of a population has been tremendously powerful.
Today’s work in cybersecurity often focuses on an individual (either an individual human or an individual enterprise). We believe there is a tremendous possibility in the frame, and that a diverse and broad community will have a tremendous impact.
*APPLYING PUBLIC HEALTH THINKING TO CYBERSECURITY *
Adopting a public health-style perspective that embraces data-driven investigation, population thinking, and preventative approaches to shared risks would be transformative for the practice of cybersecurity. Experts could systematically test associations between risk factors and cyber threats, measure and compare the effectiveness of interventions, and adopt preventative measures that reduce both local and systemic risks to make the internet more secure and resilient for all.
*THE PATH TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CYBER PUBLIC HEALTH*
We are mobilizing a global community of experts, business leaders, and policymakers to work together on proposals to unlock other critical datasets and establish standards for the collection and reporting of key Data.
One element of this is that we hope to see a cyber public health lab at a major university by 2030.
Establishing a science of Cyber Public Health will require overcoming some significant challenges. The biggest challenge is data. We need to build the foundations of Cyber Public Health on vast quantities of high-quality data, but we have precious little of it. Arguably, Florence Nightingale and John Smith had access to more relevant, large-scale data than cybersecurity professionals today.
The second big challenge is building the infrastructure and institutions to support a mature practice of Cyber Public Health. For example, today’s public health infrastructure includes institutions at every level of government, international NGOs, academic institutions, and private organizations that play a role.
This is another area where coordination and collaboration among businesses, NGOs, academic institutions, and governments will be critical to navigating a path forward. The challenges are significant, but the opportunities are immense. Please join the initiative to make the science of Cyber Public Health. Monthly discussions are scheduled for the fourth Thursday of the month.
Equity and justice are increasingly prevalent themes in political, economic, and social discussions about energy and the environment.
As the United States and other nations pursue governance around pollution, climate change, and natural resources, it is an opportune time to explore the variety of theoretical, empirical, and practical approaches scholars are taking to explore the intersection of these issues.
This working group brings scholars of multiple disciplines together to pursue research on questions of equity, access to environmental services, protection from environmental degradation and energy insecurity, and the distributive effects of governance of energy resources and the environment.
The Hu Standards Working Group is charged with developing, testing, and publishing standards for applying the Human Impact Unit (Hu) when quantifying the intangible value of sustainability or corporate responsibility efforts undertaken within our communities. The Hu Standards Working Group meets monthly and is open to all interested parties, with Voting Members representing academic institutions, industry experts, and community leaders responsible for updating and publishing accepted Hu Standards annually.
The Working Group will start in September 2024. It is hosted by Chris Draper and Angie Raymond (Program: Data Management and Information Governance) If interested, contact Angie Raymond at angraymo@iu.edu.
Understanding the design of institutions that govern individual and collective behavior is of enduring interest to scholars across disciplines. Ultimately, to develop theoretically and practically meaningful assessments of institutional designs, robust approaches for characterizing them are needed. Robust approaches are those that reliably and validly capture features of institutional design, are generalizable across institutional domains, and are theoretically and methodologically versatile. One such approach is the Institutional Grammar, the focus of the Institutional Grammar Working Group.
The Institutional Grammar Working Group convenes scholars from around the world who are interested in the study and practice of institutional analysis leveraging the Institutional Grammar. Working Group members are using the Institutional Grammar in their empirically and/or theoretically motivated research, and are thus interested in its theoretical and methodological advancement.
The Working Group hosts monthly open, online seminars during which Working Group members share their research, deliberate on various Institutional Grammar discussion topics, and occasionally offer tutorials on using the Institutional Grammar.
The Working Group is co-hosted by Edella Schlager, Professor and Director of the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, and Saba Siddiki, Associate Professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
The Working Group’s mission is aligned with that of the Institutional Grammar Research Initiative (IGRI) which engages scholars pursuing research relating to one or more of the following themes.
Computational Text Analysis with the Institutional Grammar - Development and application of computational text analysis and supervised machine learning approaches for evaluating institutions based on the Institutional Grammar Evaluating Institutional Performance - Utilization of the Institutional Grammar to develop theoretically informed criteria for assessing the quality of institutions Using the Institutional Grammar to Study Simulated and Real Behavior - Application of the Institutional Grammar to study the interaction between formal and informal institutions - Exploration of how the Institutional Grammar can be used in conjunction with game-theoretic approaches and agent-based modeling to facilitate institutional modeling and analysis in silico
There has always been a significant interplay between Law, Economics, and Technology. As technology advances, it can pose new legal and economic challenges and opportunities; at the same time, the predominant legal and economic philosophies of the day can impact the rate and direction of technological change. With the accelerating pace of technological change, particularly over the past few decades, it has become essentially impossible for the leaders in law, economics, and technology to treat the status of their counterparts as fixed. That is, technological developers cannot pursue innovation assuming a static legal and economic environment, and legal/economics scholars cannot develop theories and policy assuming a static state of technology. Of course, this has always been true in the technical sense, but practically speaking, until relatively recently, each group could reasonably make such assumptions to a first approximation without great cost; now such an assumption could be extremely costly.
Recently, much attention has been placed on artificial intelligence (AI), but its increased prominence is just the latest iteration of the increasing pressure for law, economics, and technology leaders to build mutual understanding in order to adequately address the rapidly changing facets of their interdependence. As we write this, businesses, economists, legal scholars, and policymakers are still grappling with fundamental aspects of Internet regulation thirty years after the Internet’s commercial inception - a prime example being Section 230, which was established in 1996. Another more recent example is how we regulate proliferation of consumers’ information, as done through the Europe Union’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In what ways do we want consumer information used for our benefit, and when do we want it not used?
The effectiveness of legal frameworks, regulatory policies, and business practices in established and nascent technology markets will increasingly demand that their architects have cross-disciplinary competence. The LET Incubator aims to facilitate that process by co-hosting a series of monthly, informal conversations that will lead to white papers to help inform these debates among practitioners, policymakers, students, academics, and the general public.
If you wish to join this working group, contact Scott Shackelford, Angie Raymond, Kosali Simon, or Jeff Prince.
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the long-standing vaccine inequality and vaccine inequity between the global North and global South. This was particularly apparent in the continent of Africa; it had the lowest vaccination rate of any continent. India and South Africa proposed a waiver to The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), but a waiver in itself is insufficient in equipping the Global South to fight a pandemic. Technology transfer (as defined by the World Intellectual Property Organisation) is a much better solution, its successes were exemplified in Brazil.
Hosts Include: Angie Raymond, Zoe Ejiofor and Professor Emmanuel Oke at the Edinburgh Law School (UK).
If you are interested in joinging the working group, reach out to Angie Raymond at angraymo@iu.edu.
The Polycentricity Working Group welcomes any and all students and scholars who are either research active, or are interested in learning more about polycentric governance, the Ostrom Design Principles, and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD), Social-Ecological Systems (SES), and Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) Frameworks. The Ostrom Workshop community has historically been at the forefront of this work, and through this effort we seek to spread awareness of the Bloomington School and continue pushing the frontiers of multi-disciplinary governance research.
If you have an interest in polycentricity and want to get involved, please email Elizabeth Baldwin.
Global and local commons are central to the intersecting challenges of climate change, sustainability, and resource degradation. While this has always been the case, questions of inequality and justice have gained greater significance in the present moment, in which the fate of global and local commons is tied together more strongly than ever before.
For example, powerful actors seek to use local forest commons as sites for global restoration efforts or international carbon offset projects that are meant to stop the deterioration of global atmospheric commons. At the same time, because of the widespread reckoning with questions of justice and equity both global and local commons present new opportunities for justice-centered resource stewardship.
The Ostrom Workshop Working Group on “Power, Inequality and Justice in the Commons” builds on the workshop tradition of institutional analysis to develop novel analytical approaches for a deeper understanding of issues of power, inequality, and justice in the commons.
To do so, we engage with a plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches, including classical institutional analysis of the commons and interdisciplinary fields such as political economy, political ecology, agrarian studies, critical theory, development studies, and urban studies.
This working group will act as a hub of brainstorming, researching, and writing that both advances our knowledge and is relevant for policy-making, and citizen actions. It aims to build stronger bridges between the Ostrom Workshop and the members of International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC). We welcome early- and late- career scholars, scholar-activists, and other researchers to join us in this exciting new endeavor.
The possibility of harvesting valuable minerals from the seabed has produced one of the most elaborate and ambitious international attempts to manage a common space. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, negotiated during the 1970s, built a legal framework for the International Seabed Authority as an instrument to manage the resources of the deep seabed. In the 1990s, the ISA began operations and it is now a fully functioning international organization with a multinational staff.
In the last few years, the work of the ISA has accelerated in several respects. It has adopted regulations for seabed exploration and is developing additional regulations for commercial exploitation. Yet important questions have emerged about whether the ISA’s structure and working procedures are adequate for the effective regulation of commercial mining. Attention to the potential environmental consequences of seabed mining have been particularly salient.
The Working Group plans periodic meetings with scholars and practitioners from around the world related to seabed mining and the work of the ISA in particular. The Group seeks to contribute to policy discussions related to the ISA’s performance while also bringing the organization’s work into dialogue with the broader scholarly work on governing common spaces. The Group welcomes members and discussions employing the Ostroms’ work and other theories derived from a variety of disciplines.
This working group is co-sponsored by the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies.
The Ostroms’ work has been adapted to a wide range of sectors and disciplines, from fisheries and forests to climate change and, more recently, to the final frontier. There is a growing literature on applying polycentric principles to space governance, and more broadly addressing collective action problems including orbital debris and space weaponization. Nevertheless, the Working Group hosts discussions employing other theories to space governance.
The Working Group holds monthly meetings of space law & governance with scholars and professionals from around the world sharing their research and ideas. The Group welcomes members and discussions employing the Ostroms’ work and other theories, of various disciplines, to space governance.
Water governance had a special place in Elinor Ostrom’s research. This working group aims to continue that research agenda, considering new challenges posed by climate, global socio-economic changes, and different property arrangements on water. From interdisciplinary perspectives, employing field studies and other empirical and theoretical approaches, we explore collective action around different water uses, such as food production, livelihood, and industry.
The working group holds monthly online meetings and aims to bring together scholars and professionals around water governance.
