The Cycling Commons Manifesto¶
A commons is not a free-for-all and it is not a company's database with an open licence bolted on. It is a shared resource that a community governs, sustains, and protects from enclosure. Cyclists already produce an enormous amount of knowledge about the world they ride through — where the water is, which climb is worth the detour, which junction is dangerous. Today that knowledge is locked in closed silos or lost entirely. The Cycling Commons exists to set it free and keep it free.
The theory underneath: Ostrom, not Hardin¶
The lazy assumption — Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) — says a shared resource is doomed to be overused and ruined. Elinor Ostrom showed that's not inevitable. Her work Governing the Commons (1990) won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics by showing that communities the world over have sustainably governed shared resources for centuries — without privatising them and without a central owner — when a handful of design principles are in place: clear boundaries, rules made by the people affected, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and cheap conflict resolution.
Hardin's tragedy is about rivalrous resources — a pasture, a fishery — where one person's taking depletes another's share. Open data is the opposite: non-rivalrous, and better the more it is used — you cannot overgraze a dataset. So the risk to a cycling commons is not overuse. It is enclosure (someone privatising what the community built) and neglect (too few contributors, or spam drowning the signal). Ostrom's principles are what guard against those failures — the threat model an open dataset actually faces.
The Cycling Commons is a deliberate, modern application of Ostrom's principles to cycling data. The Governance page maps each principle to a concrete part of the system. This is why the Commons can be open and survive: it is governed, not merely published.
The principles¶
I. The Commons is the map, not the rider. Everything in the Commons is about the world — roads, climbs, water, hazards — and never about a person's fitness, identity, or movements.
II. Open for everyone. The data is published under the Open Database Licence (ODbL) with a free query API and bulk exports. Anyone may build on it — commercial or not.
III. Build on OpenStreetMap; give back to it. OSM is the open base map. We do not re-collect it — we curate the cycling layers it is thin on, and we contribute durable facts back upstream. The ODbL is chosen precisely so data can flow back to OSM.
IV. Nothing personal, ever. A person's identity, history, fitness metrics, and movements never enter the Commons. The map is public; the person is not. Aggregate activity may inform the map without the trace ever entering it — see the sensing boundary.
V. Curation, not overload. The Commons is not a contest to hold the most rows. For the things that are a matter of taste — best climbs, bike-friendly stays, finest views, history & culture, top quality rides — it surfaces the best of a region, as judged by the riders who know it, not an undifferentiated firehose.
VI. The community governs the Commons. The people who contribute decide what rises to the top, by voting, in open rounds. Curators serve the community; they do not rule it.
VII. Freshness is a duty. A "road closed" that never expires becomes a lie. Perishable data carries a lifecycle — timestamps, confirmations, and decay — so the map heals itself instead of rotting.
VIII. Provenance kept, identity never. The Commons records that riders confirmed a fact and when — never who. Trust without surveillance.
IX. Respect the ground. Never trespass. Private, restricted, and no-entry roads are marked so they can be avoided, never to encourage entering them. The Commons makes riders better guests of the places they ride.
X. Cycling is for every body. Accessibility is first-class: adapted-bike and handbike friendliness, gradient limits, and surface suitability are data the Commons actively collects, not an afterthought.
XI. Never scraped, never sold, never enclosed. Data is contributed or already open — never scraped. The Commons is not a foundation's asset to one day paywall. Its licence and its governance are built so it cannot be enclosed later, even by the people who started it.