Maxime Peacock
Title: CONSTITUTING THE COMMONS: AN ANCHOR-INTERMEDIARY PARTNERSHIP AND DIGITAL COMMONS FORMATION AT THE RIDEAU COMMUNITY HUB
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Erkki Karo, Dr. Alexandros Pazaitis
Opponent: Prof. Dr. Vasilis Kostakis
Defense: 8 June 2026
Abstract: Digital commons alternatives to extractive platforms require not only technical infrastructure but governance-capable communities to steward them. Yet the commons governance and intermediary literatures presuppose that such communities already exist. This thesis asks: how does an anchor-intermediary partnership assemble the institutional preconditions for digital commons governance in a community formation context? It develops the concept of constitutive intermediation, the prior work of producing collective-choice capacity where no governance collective previously exists, by integrating anchor institution, innovation intermediary, and field-emergence literatures. The concept is applied through a participatory action research case study at the Rideau Community Hub in Ottawa, Canada, a multi-tenant community building housing approximately thirty non-profit organizations. Empirical material comprises a survey (n=28), a participatory focus group, an interview with the anchor institution's Executive Director, and eight months of participant observation. The analysis finds that constitutive intermediary work produces observable proto-institutional outputs: mutual legibility, boundary definitions, candidate governance models, but surfaces rather than resolves the governance void it addresses. The thesis proposes that digital commons deployment may depend less on attracting individual users than on assembling governance-capable collectives, reframing the unit of analysis for digital commons formation.
Keywords: digital commons, constitutive intermediation, anchor institutions, commons-based peer production, participatory action research
