Morea, Valeria

This research explores how practical knowledge is developed and shared and the obstacles its provision processes may face. Specifically, it focuses on the institutional arrangements that guide the behaviour of a community of makers and on how these arrangements are devised through the process of collective action. Adopting the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, the study focuses on Makerspace Delft, a community of makers and hobbyists in the cultural sector in Delft, the Netherlands. The data was collected mainly by semi-structured interviews with the members of the community, triangulated with secondary sources from various documents, communications and participant observation. The data were analysed based on the Institutional Development Analysis framework. The results show that practical knowledge is primarily contained in people themselves rather than either physical or virtual artifacts. Accordingly, the opportunities where people meet and interact in a common practice are the main facilities for knowledge sharing. Most importantly, people are intrinsically motivated to share their knowledge but are much less interested in orchestrating the opportunities for sharing. The social dilemmas are therefore present principally in the provision of the infrastructure for the practical knowledge commons. The data also reveals that most of the present institutional arrangements are informal and that there is almost no monitoring, sanctions, or conflict resolution system in place. Through its findings, the research contributes firstly to the existing knowledge commons literature by discovering makerspaces and maker communities as a new category to study shared knowledge resources. Secondly, it introduces an institutional analysis focused on collective action to the makerspace scholarship, in which aspects of organisation and management have received little attention. Lastly, it enriches the practical knowledge management studies of community-based, decentralised approach to knowledge governance.