Ownership

It's a good read, written some 4 years ago at the time of writing. This metaphor takes the view of a site as a house, and by extension we guess the Home Page would be your front door.

There are other pages on ownership in the federation that explore ownership in relation to the community or commons:

- Property and Ownership - Self-ownership - Focus, Ownership, Complacency - Project Ownership - Site ownership verification - Combine common ownership & individual use - Code Ownership - Collective Code Ownership - Wiki Shared Ownership Test Criteria - Ultimate Test For Joint Ownership

While here my interest is in the legal definition of ownership, as it relates to modern or future looking conceptions of Identity. These relate more directly to:

- Owning Your Data - Owning Your Own Domain - Ownership Metaphor

What we seek here is a range of definitions or types of ownership that build on Self-sovereign Identity into order to enable more diverse forms of collective or groupings that participate in creating varied forms of commons. For such a rich and sophisticated notion of ownership we require not simply a definition or series of metaphors, but a language that is able to express the real-world functioning of this ownership.

In short, as in many of the examples of commons cited (open source or Creative Commons), ownership is a license or more generally a form of contract that we enter into. Ownership is the effect of this performative code on our imagination, and while the idea may start in the imagination of a philosopher, it is only when it is codified in law and then experienced socially that this concept becomes manifest.

In this journey we are better to start with the collective and the individual. We describe and give form to their identity, and only then do we as needed build a house or create other conceptions of property. We might say that we in wiki we should start with the Nomad.