Owning or Sharing? New Thinking for a New World

Most of us really enjoy walking in a lush, green park or a large garden that is free of traffic, cycle on tree-lined streets and in these lockdown times, play or read or just sit on a terrace or garden in our apartment buildings. Do you think it is fair that we should pay to use these spaces or get a permit every time we want to use them? None of us really owns these spaces but we use them and ‘someone else’ seems to take care of them. Shouldn't they be paid for that? 

Let's put these questions to something we are all familiar with- Wikipedia. A lot of us use it almost on a daily (if not hourly) basis for research projects in school or to get information about some historical event etc. How does this work? It appears to be something that no one owns but everybody can access and share. In this course we look forward to exploring some of these questions in the context of how we respond to challenges and uncertainties thrown up by larger events like climate change and of course now the COVID-19 pandemic. What do ownership, permission, sharing mean when it comes to research, ways to manage disease, access to vaccines etc.? 

At the heart of this course is an attempt to understand how choices about what we own and what we share influence the future of our common world.

Read the course facilitator, Radha Gopalan's blog post about her work in the past with 14 year olds on similar issues.